The_White_Goddess_A_Historical_Grammar_o

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R O B E R T G R A V E S 
T H E W H I T E 
G O D D E S S 
IN DEDICATION 
All saints revile her, and all sober men 
Ruled by the God Apollo 's golden mean— 
In scorn of which I sailed to find her 
In distant regions likeliest to hold her 
W h o m I desired above all things to know, 
Sister of the mirage and echo. 
It was a virtue not to stay, 
To go my headstrong and heroic w a y 
Seeking her out at the volcano's head, 
A m o n g pack ice, or where the track had faded 
Beyond the cavern of the seven sleepers: 
Whose broad high brow was white as any leper's, 
Whose eyes were blue, with rowan-berry lips, 
With hair curled honey-coloured to white hips. 
Green sap of Spring in the young wood a-stir 
Will celebrate the Mountain Mother, 
And every song-bird shout awhile for her; 
But I am gifted, even in November 
Rawest of seasons, with so huge a sense 
Of her nakedly worn magnificence 
I forget cruelty and past betrayal, 
Careless of where the next bright bolt may fall. 
F O R E W O R D 
Iam grateful to Philip and Sally Graves, Christopher Hawkes, John Knittel, Valentin Iremonger, Max Mallowan, E. M. Parr, Joshua Podro, Lynette Roberts, Martin Seymour-Smith, John Heath-Stubbs 
and numerous correspondents, who have supplied me with source-
material for this book: and to Kenneth Gay who has helped me to arrange 
it. Ye t since the first edition appeared in 1946, no expert in ancient 
Irish or Welsh has offered me the least help in refining my argument, or 
pointed out any of the errors which are bound to have crept into the text, 
or even acknowledged my letters. I am disappointed, though not really 
surprised. The book does read very queerly: but then of course a histori-
cal grammar of the language of poetic myth has never previously been 
attempted, and to write it conscientiously I have had to face such 'puzzling 
questions, though not beyond all conjecture', as Sir Thomas Browne 
instances in his Hydriotaphia: 'what song the Sirens sang, or what name 
Achilles assumed when he hid himself among the women. ' I found practi-
cal and unevasive answers to these and many other questions of the same 
sort, such as: 
W h o cleft the Devi l ' s foot? 
When did the Fifty Danaids come with their sieves to Britain? 
What secret was woven into the Gordian Knot? 
W h y did Jehovah create trees and grass before he created the Sun, 
Moon and stars? 
Where shall Wisdom be found? 
But it is only fair to warn readers that this remains a very difficult book, as 
well as a very queer one, to be avoided by anyone with a distracted, tired 
or rigidly scientific mind. I have not cared to leave out any step in the 
laborious argument, if only because readers of my recent historical novels 
have grown a little suspicious of unorthodox conclusions for which the 
authorities are not always quoted. Perhaps they will now be satisfied, for 
example, that the mystical Bull-calf formula and the two Tree-alphabets 
which I introduced into King Jesus are not 'wanton figments' of my 
imagination but logically deduced from reputable ancient documents. 
My thesis is that the language of poetic myth anciently current in the 
Mediterranean and Northern Europe was a magical language bound up 
with popular religious ceremonies in honour of the Moon-goddess, or 
9 
Muse, some of them dating from the Old Stone A g e , and that this remains 
die language of true poetry—'true' in the nostalgic modern sense of 'the 
unimprovable original, not a synthetic substitute'. The language was tam-
pered with in late Minoan times when invaders from Central Asia began 
to substitute patrilinear for matrilinear institutions and remodel or falsify 
the myths to justify the social changes. Then came the early Greek philo-
sophers who were strongly opposed to magical poetry as threatening their 
new religion of logic, and under their influence a rational poetic language 
(now called the Classical) was elaborated in honour of their patron Apol lo 
and imposed on the world as the last word in spiritual illumination: a view 
that has prevailed practically ever since in European schools and universi-
ties, where myths are now studied only as quaint relics of the nursery age 
of mankind. 
One of the most uncompromising rejections of early Greek mythology 
was made by Socrates. Myths frightened or offended him; he preferred to 
turn his back on them and discipline his mind to think scientifically: 'to 
investigate the reason of the being of everything—of everything as it is, 
not as it appears, and to reject all opinions of which no account can be 
given. ' 
Here is a typical passage from Plato's Phaedrus, (Cary 's translation): 
Phae. Tell me, Socrates, is not Boreas reported to have carried off 
Orithya from somewhere about this part of the Hissus? 
Socr. So it is said. 
Phae. Must it not have been from this spot? for the water here-
abouts appears beautiful, clear and transparent, and well suited for 
damsels to sport about. 
Socr. N o , but lower down, as much as two or three stadia, where we 
cross over to the temple of the Huntress, and where there is, on the 
very spot, a kind of altar sacred to Boreas. 
Phae. I never noticed it. But tell me, by Jupiter, Socrates, do you 
believe that this fabulous account is true? 
Socr. If I disbelieved it, as the wise do, I should not be guilty of any 
absurdity: then having recourse to subtleties, I should say that a blast 
of Boreas threw her down from the neighbouring cliffs, as she was 
sporting with Pharmacea, and that having thus met her death she was 
said to have been carried off by Boreas, or from Mars' hill; for there is 
also another report that she was carried off from thence and not from 
this spot. But I, for my part, Phaedrus, consider such things as pretty 
enough, but as the province of a very curious, painstaking, and not 
very happy man, and for no other reason than that after this he must 
set us right as to the form of the Hippocentaurs, and then as to that of 
the Chimaera; besides, there pours in upon him a crowd of similar 
10 
monsters, Gorgons and Pegasuses, and other monstrous creatures, 
incredible in number and absurdity, which if anyone were to dis-
believe and endeavour to reconcile each with probability, employing 
for this purpose a kind of vulgar cleverness, he will stand in need of 
abundant leisure. But I have no leisure at all for such matters; and the 
cause of it, my friend, is this: I am not yet able, according to the 
Delphic precept, to know myself. But it appears to me to be ridiculous, 
while I am still ignorant of this, to busy myself about matters that do 
not concern me. 
T h e fact was, that by Socrates' time the sense of most myths belonging 
to the previous epoch was either forgotten or kept a close religious 
secret, though they were still preserved pictorially in religious art and 
still current as fairy-tales from which the poets quoted. When invited to 
believe in the Chimaera, the horse-centaurs, or the winged horse Pegasus, 
all of them straight-forward Pelasgian cult-symbols, a philosopher felt 
bound to reject them as a-zoological improbabilities; and because he 
had no notion of the true identity of 'the nymph Orithya' or of the history 
of the ancient Athenian cult of Boreas, he could give only an inept 
naturalistic explanation of her rape at Mount Ilissus: 'doubtless she was 
blown off one of the cliffs hereabouts and met her death at the foot.' 
Al l the problems that Socrates mentions have been faced in this book 
and solved to my own satisfaction at least; but though 'a very curious and 
painstaking person' I cannot agree that I am any less happy than Socrates 
was, or that I have more leisure than he had, or that an understanding of 
the language of myth is irrelevant to self-knowledge. I deduce from the 
petulant tone of his phrase 'vulgar cleverness' that he had spent a long time 
worrying about the Chimaera, the horse-centaursand the rest, but that 
the 'reasons of their being' had eluded him because he was no poet and 
mistrusted poets, and because, as he admitted to Phaedrus, he was a con-
firmed townsman who seldom visited the countryside: 'fields and trees 
will not teach me anything, but men do. ' T h e study of mythology, as I 
shall show, is based squarely on tree-lore and seasonal observation of life 
in the fields. 
Socrates, in turning his back on poetic myths, was really turning his 
back on the Moon-goddess who inspired them and who demanded that 
man should pay woman spiritual and sexual homage: what is called 
Platonic love, the philosopher's escape from the power of the Goddess 
into intellectual homosexuality, was really Socratic love. He could not 
plead ignorance: Diotima Mantinice, the Arcadian prophetess w h o 
magically arrested the plague at Athens, had reminded him once that 
man's love was properly directed towards women and that Moira, 
Hithyia and Callone—Death, Birth and Beauty—formed a triad of 
Goddesses who presided over all acts of generation whatsoever: physical, 
spiritual or intellectual. In the passage of the Symposium where Plato 
reports Socrates' account of Diotima's wise words, the banquet is inter-
rupted by Alcibiades, who comes in very drunk in search of a beautiful 
boy called Agathon and finds him reclining next to Socrates. Presently 
he tells everyone that he himself once encouraged Socrates, who was in 
love with him, to an act of sodomy from which, however, he philo-
sophically abstained, remaining perfectly satisfied with night-long chaste 
embraces of his beloved's.beautiful body. Had Diotima been present to 
hear this she would have made a w r y face and spat three times into her 
bosom: for though the Goddess as Cybele and Ishtar tolerated sodomy 
even in her own temple-courts, ideal homosexuality was a far more serious 
moral aberrancy—it was the male intellect trying to make itself spiritually 
self-sufficient. Her revenge on Socrates—if I may put it this way—for 
trying to know himself in the Apollonian style instead of leaving the task 
to a wife or mistress, was characteristic: she found him a shrew for a wife 
and made him fix his idealistic affections on this same Alcibiades, who 
disgraced him by growing up vicious, godless, treacherous and selfish— 
the ruin of Athens. She ended his life with a draught of the white-
flowered, mousey-smelling hemlock, a plant sacred to herself as Hecate, 1 
prescribed him by his fellow-citizens in punishment for his corruption of 
youth. After his death his disciples made a martyr of him and under their 
influence myths fell into still greater disrepute, becoming at last the sub-
ject of street-corner witticisms or being 'explained away' by Euhemerus 
of Messenia and his successors as corruptions of history. The Euhemerist 
account of the Actaeon myth, for instance, is that he was an Arcadian 
gentleman who was so addicted to hunting that the expense of keeping a 
pack of hounds ate him up. 
But even after Alexander the Great had cut the Gordian Knot—an act 
of far greater moral significance than is generally realized—the ancient 
language survived purely enough'in the secret Mystery-cults of Eleusis, 
Corinth, Samothrace and elsewhere; and when these were suppressed by 
the early Christian Emperors it was still taught in the poetic colleges of 
Ireland and Wales, and in the witch-covens of Western Europe. As a pop-
ular religious tradition it all but flickered out at the close of the seven-
teenth century: and though poetry of a magical quality is still occasionally 
written, even in industrialized Europe, this always results from an in-
spired, almost pathological, reversion to the original language—a wild 
Pentecostal 'speaking with tongues'—rather than from a conscientious 
study of its grammar and vocabulary. 
English poetic education should, really, begin not with the Canterbury 
Tales, not with the Odyssey, not even with Genesis, but with the Song of 
1 As Shakespeare knew. See Macbeth, IV, i, 25. 
12 
Amergin, an ancient Celtic calendar-alphabet, found in several purposely 
garbled Irish and Welsh variants, which briefly summarizes the prime 
poetic myth. I have tentatively restored the text as follows: 
I am a stag: ofseven tines, 
I am a flood: across a plain, 
I am a wind: on a deep lake, 
I am a tean the Sun lets fall, 
I am a hawk: above the cliff, 
I am a thorn: beneath the nail, 
I am a wonder: among flowers, 
I am a wizard: who but I 
Sets the cool head aflame with smoke? 
I am a spear: that roars for blood, 
I am a salmon: in a pool, 
I am a lure: from paradise, 
I am a hill: where poets walk, 
I am a boar: ruthless and red, 
I am a breaker: threatening doom, 
I am a tide: that drags to death, 
I am an infant: who but I 
Peeps from the unhewn dolmen arch ? 
I am the womb: of every holt, 
I am the blaze: on every hill, 
I am the queen: of every hire, 
I am the shield: for every head, 
I am the tomb: of every hope. 
It is unfortunate that, despite the strong mythical element in Christian-
ity, 'mythical' has come to mean 'fanciful, absurd, unhistorical'; for fancy 
piayed a negligible part in the development of the Greek, Latin and 
Palestinian myths, or of the Celtic myths until the Norman-French 
trovires worked them up into irresponsible romances of chivalry. They 
are all grave records of ancient religious customs or events, and reliable 
enough as history once their language is understood and allowance has 
been made for errors in transcription, misunderstandings of obsolete 
ritual, and deliberate changes introduced for moral or political reasons. 
Some myths of course have survived in a far purer form than others; for 
example, the Fables of Hyginus, the Library of Apollodorus and the 
earlier tales of the Welsh Mabinogion make easy reading compared with 
the deceptively simple chronicles of Genesis, Exodus, Judges and Samuel. 
Perhaps the greatest difficulty in solving complex mythological problems 
is that: 
*3 
Conquering gods their titles take 
From the foes they captive make, 
and that to know the name of a deity at any given place or period, is far 
less important than to know the nature of the sacrifices that he or she was 
then offered. The powers of the gods were continuously being redefined. 
The Greek god Apol lo , for instance, seems to have begun as the Demon 
of a Mouse-fraternity in pre-Aryan totemistic Europe: he gradually rose 
in divine rank by force of arms, blackmail and fraud until he became the 
patron of Music, Poetry and the Arts and finally, in some regions at least, 
ousted his 'father' Zeus from the Sovereignty of the Universe by identify-
ing himself with Belinus the intellectual G o d of Light. Jehovah, the G o d of 
the J ews , has a still more complex history. 
'What is the use or function of poetry nowadays?' is a question not the 
less poignant for being defiandy asked by so many stupid people or 
apologetically answered by so many silly people. T h e function of poetry 
is religious invocation of the Muse; its use is the experience of mixed 
exaltation and horror that her presence excites. But 'nowadays'? Function 
and use remain the same; only the application has changed. This was once 
a warning to man that he must keep in harmony with the family of living 
creatures among which he was born, by obedience to the wishes of the 
lady of the house; it is now a reminder that he has disregarded the warn-
ing, turned the house upside down by capricious experiments in philo-
sophy, science and industry, and brought ruin on himself and his family. 
'Nowadays ' is a civilization in which the prime emblems of poetry are dis-
honoured. In which serpent, lion and eagle belong to the circus-tent; ox, 
salmon and boar to the cannery; racehorse and greyhound to the betting 
ring; and the sacred grove to die saw-mill. In which the Moon is despised 
asa burned-out satellite of the Earth and woman reckoned as 'auxiliary 
State personnel'. In which money will buy almost anything but truth, and 
almost anyone but the truth-possessed poet. 
Call me, if you like, the fox who has lost his brush; I am nobody's 
servant and have chosen to live on the outskirts of a Majorcan mountain-
village, Catholic but anti-ecclesiastical, where life is still ruled by the old 
agricultural cycle. Without my brush, namely my contact with urban 
civilization, all that I write must read perversely and irrelevantly to such 
of you as are still geared to the industrial machine, whether direcdy as 
workers, managers, traders or advertisers or indirecdy as civil servants, 
publishers, journalists, schoolmasters or employees of a radio corpora-
tion. If you are poets, you will realize that acceptance of my historical 
thesis commits you to a confession of disloyalty which you will be loth to 
make; you chose your jobs because they promised to provide you with a 
steady income and leisure to render the Goddess whom you adore 
M 
valuable part-time service. W h o am I, you will ask, to warn you that she 
demands either whole-time service or none at all? And do I suggest that 
you should resign your jobs and for want of sufficient capital to set up as 
small-holders, turn romantic shepherds—as D o n Quixote did after his 
failure to come to terms with the modern world—in remote unmechanized 
farms? N o , my brushlessness debars me from offering any practical 
suggestion. I dare attempt only a historical statement of the problem; 
how you come to terms with the Goddess is no concern of mine. I do not 
even know that you are serious in your poetic profession. 
R . G . 
Deya, 
Mallorca, 
Spain. 
Chapter One 
POETS A N D GLEEMEN 
Since the age of fifteen poetry has been my ruling passion and I have never intentionally undertaken any task or formed any relationship that seemed inconsistent with poetic principles; which has sometimes 
won me the reputation of an eccentric. Prose has been my livelihood, but 
I have used it as a means of sharpening my sense of the altogether different 
nature of poetry, and the themes that I choose are always linked in my 
mind with outstanding poetic problems. At the age of sixty-five I am still 
amused at the paradox of poetry's obstinate continuance in the present 
phase of civilization. Though recognized as a learned profession it is the 
only one for the study of which no academies are open and in which there 
is no yard-stick, however crude, by which technical proficiency is con-
sidered measurable. 'Poets are born, not made.' The deduction that one is 
expected to draw from this is that the nature of poetry is too mysterious 
to bear examination: is, indeed, a greater mystery even than royalty, since 
kings can be made as well as born and the quoted utterances of a dead king 
carry little weight either in the pulpit or the public bar. 
The paradox can be explained by the great official prestige that still 
somehow clings to the name of poet, as it does to the name of king, and by 
the feeling that poetry, since it defies scientific analysis, must be rooted in 
some sort of magic, and that magic is disreputable. European poetic lore 
is, indeed, ultimately based on magical principles, the rudiments of which 
formed a close religious secret for centuries but which were at last garbled, 
discredited and forgotten. N o w it is only by rare accidents of spiritual 
regression that poets make their lines magically potent in the ancient sense. 
Otherwise, the contemporary practice of poem-writing recalls the medi-
aevalalchemist's fantastic and foredoomed experiments in transmuting base 
metal into gold; except that the alchemist did at least recognize pure gold 
when he saw and handled it. The truth is that only gold ore can be turned into 
gold; only poetry into poems. This book is about the rediscovery of the lost 
rudiments, and about the active principles of poetic magic that govern them. 
My argument will be based on a detailed examination of two extra-
ordinary Welsh minstrel poems of the thirteenth century, in which the 
clues to this ancient secret are ingeniously concealed. 
17 
By way of historical introduction, a clear distinction must first be 
drawn between the court-bards and the wandering minstrels of ancient 
Wales. The Welsh bards, or master-poets, like the Irish, had a professional 
tradition, embodied in a corpus of poems which, literally memorized and 
carefully weighed, they passed on to the pupils who came to study under 
them. The English poets of to-day, whose language began as a despised 
late-mediaeval vernacular when Welsh poetry was already a hoary 
institution, may envy them in retrospect: the young poet was spared the 
curse of having doubtfully to build up his poetic lore for himself by hap-
hazard reading, consultation with equally doubtful friends, and experi-
mental writing. Latterly, however, it was only in Ireland that a master-
poet was expected, or even permitted, to write in an original style. When 
the Welsh poets were converted to orthodox Christianity and subjected 
to ecclesiastical discipline—a process completed by the tenth century, as 
the contemporary Welsh Laws show—their tradition gradually ossified. 
Though a high degree of technical skill was still required of master-poets 
and the Chair of Poetry was hody contested in the various Courts, they 
were pledged to avoid what the Church called 'untruth', meaning the 
dangerous exercise of poetic imagination in myth or allegory. Only certain 
epithets and metaphors were authorized; themes were similarly restricted, 
metres fixed, and Cynghanedd, the repetitive use of consonantal sequences 
with variation of vowels 1 , became a burdensome obsession. The master-
poets had become court-officials, their first obligation being to praise 
G o d , their second to praise the king or prince who had provided a Chair 
for them at his royal table. Even after the fall of the Welsh princes in the 
late thirteenth century this barren poetic code was maintained by the 
family bards in noble houses. 
T. G w y n n Jones writes in The Transactions of the Honourable Society of 
Cymmrodorion (1913—1914): 
The few indications which may be gathered from the works of the 
bards, down to the fall of the Welsh princes, imply that the system 
detailed in the Laws was preserved, but probably with progressive 
modification. The Llyfr Coch Hergest metrical Code shows a still 
further development, which in the fifteenth century resulted in the 
Carmarthen Eisteddfod The subject tradition recorded in this Code, 
1 Cynghanedd may be illustrated in English thus: 
Billet spied, 
Bolt sped. 
Across field 
Crows f l ed , 
Aloft, wounded, 
Left one dead. 
But the corresponden ce of the ss in 'across' and the J of 'crows', which has a V sound 
would offend the purist. 
18 
practically restricting the bards to the writing of eulogies and elegies, 
and excluding the narrative, is proved to have been observed by the 
Gogynfeirdd [court-bards]. Their adherence to what they conceived 
to be historical truth was probably due to the early capture of their 
organization by ecclesiastics. T h e y made practically no use of the 
traditional material contained in the popular Romances, and their 
knowledge of the names of mythical and quasi-historical characters 
was principally derived from the Triads. . . . Nature poetry and love 
poetry are only incidental in their works, and they show practically no 
development during the p e r i o d . . . . References to nature in the poems 
of the court-bards are brief and casual, and mostly limited to its more 
rugged aspects—the conflict of sea and strand, the violence of winter 
storms, the burning of spring growths on the mountains. The char-
acters of their heroes are only indicated in epithets; no incident is com-
pletely described;battles are dismissed in a line or two at most. Their 
theory of poetry, particularly in the eulogy, seems to have been that it 
should consist of epithets and allusions, resuming the bare facts of 
history, presumably known to their hearers. T h e y never tell a story; 
they rarely even give anything approaching a coherent description of a 
single episode. Such, indeed, has been the character of most Welsh 
verse, outside the popular ballads, practically down to the present day. 
The tales and Romances, on the other hand, are full of colour and 
incident; even characterization is not absent from them. In them, fancy, 
not affected by restrictions applying both to subject and form, develops 
into imagination. 
These tales were told by a guild of Welsh minstrels whose status was 
not regularized by the Laws , who counted no bishops or ministers of 
State among their associates, and who were at liberty to use whatever 
diction, themes and metres they pleased. Ve ry little is known about their 
organization or history, but since they were popularly credited with 
divinatory and prophetic gifts and the power of injurious satire it is likely 
that they were descended from the original Welsh master-poets who 
either refused or were refused court-patronage after the Cymric conquest 
of Wales. The Cymry , whom we think of as the real Welsh, and from 
whom the proud court-bards were recruited, were a tribal aristocracy of 
Brythonic origin holding down a serf-class that was a mixture of Goidels, 
Brythons, Bronze A g e and N e w Stone A g e peoples and Aboriginals; 
they had invaded Wales from the North of England in the fifth century 
A . D . The non-Cymric minstrels went from village to village, or farm-
house to farm-house, entertaining under the trees or in the chimney 
corner according to the season. It was they who kept alive an astonishingly 
ancient literary tradition, mainly in the form of popular tales which pre-
19 
served fragments not only of pre-Cymric, but of pre-Goidelic myth, 
some of which goes back as far as the Stone A g e . Their poetic principles 
are summed up in a Triad in the Llyfi Coch Hergest ( 'The Red Book of 
Hergest '): 
Three things that enrich the poet: 
Myths, poetic power, a store ofancient verse. 
T h e two poetic schools did not at first come in contact, the 'big-bellied' 
well-dressed court-bards being forbidden to compose in the minstrel 
style and penalized if they visited any but the houses of princes or nobles; 
the lean and ragged minstrels not being privileged to perform at any court, 
nor trained to use the complicated verse-forms required of the court-
bards. However , in the thirteenth century the minstrels were taken up by 
the Norman-French invaders, apparently through the influence of Breton 
knights who could understand Welsh and who recognized some of the 
tales as better versions of those which they had heard at home. T h e 
trovires, or finders, translated them into contemporary French and 
adapted them to the Provencal code of chivalry, and in their new dress 
they conquered Europe. 
Welsh and Norman families now intermarried and it was no longer easy 
to keep the minstrel out of the courts. In an early thirteenth-century 
poem one Phylip Brydydd records a contention between himself and 
certain 'vulgar rhymesters' as to who should first present a song on 
Christmas D a y to his patron, Prince Rhys Ieuanc at Llanbadarn F a w r in 
South Wales. Prince R h y s was a close ally of the Normans. T h e two 
thirteenth-century poems which will be here examined are the work of a 
'vulgar rhymester '—vulgar at least by Phylip's aristocratic canon of what 
a poet should be. T h e y are called the Cad Goddeu and the Hanes Taliesin. 
By the fourteenth century the literary influence of the minstrels began 
to show even in court poetry, and according to fourteenth-century ver-
sions of the bardic statute, Trioedd Kerdd, the Prydydd, or court-bard, 
might write love-poems, though debarred from satires, lampoons, 
charms, divination, or lays of magic. It was not until the fifteenth century 
that the poet Davydd ap Gwi lym won approval for a new form, the 
Kywydd, in which court poetry and minstrel poetry are united. F o r the 
most part the court-poets would not modify their obsolescent practice; 
remaining scornful and jealous of the favour shown to 'tellers of un-
truth'. Their position declined with that of their patrons and their 
authority finally collapsed as a result of the Civil Wars, in which Wales 
favoured the losing side, shortly before the Cromwellian conquest of 
Ireland also broke the power of the ollaves, or master-poets, there. Its 
revival in the bardic Gorsedd of the National Eisteddfod is somewhat of a 
mock-antique, coloured by early nineteenth-century misconceptions of 
20 
Druidic practice; yet the Eisteddfod has served to keep alive a public 
sense of the honour due to poets, and contests for the bardic Chair are as 
keen as ever. 
English poetry has had only a short experience of similar bardic 
discipline: the Classicism of the eighteenth century, when highly stylized 
diction and metre and 'decorum' of theme were insisted upon by the 
admirers and imitators of Alexander Pope. A violent reaction followed, 
the 'Romantic Reviva l ' ; then another partial return to discipline, V i c -
torian Classicism; then a still more violent reaction, the 'modernistic' 
anarchy of the 1920 's and 1930 's . English poets now appear to be con-
sidering a voluntary return to discipline: not to the eighteenth-century 
strait-jacket, nor to the Victorian frock-coat, but to that logic of poetic 
thought which gives a poem strength and grace. But where can they 
study metre, diction, and theme? Where can they find any poetic govern-
ment to which they may yield a willing loyalty? Metre, they would all 
probably agree, is the norm to which a poet relates his personal rhythm, 
the original copybook copper-plate from which he gradually develops a 
unique personal handwriting; unless such a norm is assumed, his rhythmic 
idiosyncrasies are meaningless. T h e y would also probably agree about 
diction, that it should be neither over-stylized nor vulgar. But what of 
theme? W h o has ever been able to explain what theme is poetic and what 
is unpoetic, except by the effect that it has on the reader? 
The rediscovery of the lost rudiments of poetry may help to solve the 
question of theme: if they still have validity they confirm the intuition of 
the Welsh poet Alun Lewis who wrote just before his death in Burma, in 
March 1944, o f ' the single poetic theme of Life and Death the question 
of what survives of the beloved.' Granted that there are many themes 
for the journalist of verse, yet for the poet, as Alun Lewis understood the 
word, there is no choice. The elements of the single infinitely variable 
Theme are to be found in certain ancient poetic myths which though 
manipulated to conform with each epoch of religious change—I use the 
word 'myth' in its strict sense of 'verbal iconograph' without the deroga-
tory sense of 'absurd fiction' that it has acquired—yet remain constant in 
general outline. Perfect faithfulness to the Theme affects the reader of a 
poem with a strange feeling, between delight and horror, of which the 
purely physical effect is that the hair literally stands on end. A. E. Hous-
man's test of a true poem was simple and practical: does it make the hairs 
of one's chin bristle if one repeats it silently while shaving? But he did not 
explain why the hairs should bristle. 
The ancient Celts carefully distinguished the poet, who was originally 
a priest and judge as well and whose person was sacrosanct, from the 
mere gleeman. He was in Irish called fili, a seer; in Welsh derwydd, or oak-
seer, which is the probable derivation of 'Druid ' . Even kings came under 
2 1 
his moral tutelage. When two armies engaged in battle,the poets of both 
sides would withdraw together to a hill and there judiciously discuss the 
fighting. In a sixth-century Welsh poem, the Gododin, it is remarked that 
'the poets of the world assess the men of valour'; and the combatants— 
whom they often parted by a sudden intervention—would afterwards 
accept their version of the fight, if worth commemorating in a poem, 
with reverence as well as pleasure. T h e gleeman, on the other hand, was a 
Joculator, or entertainer, not a priest: a mere client of the military oligarchs 
and without the poet's arduous professional training. He would often 
make a variety turn of his performance, with mime and tumbling. In 
Wales he was styled an eirchiad, or suppliant, one who does not belong 
to an endowed profession but is dependent for his living on the occasional 
generosity of chieftains. As early as the first century B.C. we hear from 
Poseidonius the Stoic of a bag of gold flung to a Celtic gleeman in Gaul, 
and this at a time when the Druidic system was at its strongest there. If 
the gleeman's flattery of his patrons were handsome enough and his song 
sweetly enough attuned to their mead-sodden minds, they would load 
him with gold torques and honey cakes; if not, they would pelt him with 
beef bones. But let a man offer the least indignity to an Irish poet, even 
centuries after he had forfeited his priestly functions to the Christian 
cleric, and he would compose a satire on his assailant which would bring 
out black blotches on his face and turn his bowels to water, or throw a 
'madman's wisp ' in his face and drive him insane; and surviving examples 
of the cursing poems of the Welsh minstrels show that they were also to 
be reckoned with. The court-poets of Wales, on the other hand, were 
forbidden to use curses or satires, and had to depend on legal redress for 
any insult to their dignity: according to a tenth-century digest of laws 
affecting the Welsh 'household bard' they could demand an eric of 'nine 
cows, and nine-score pence of money besides*. The figure nine recalls 
the nine-fold Muse, their former patroness. 
In ancient Ireland the ollave, or master-poet, sat next to the king at 
table and was privileged, as none else but the queen was, to wear six 
different colours in his clothes. The word 'bard', which in mediaeval 
Wales stood for a master-poet, had a different sense in Ireland, where it 
meant an inferior poet who had not passed through the 'seven degrees of 
wisdom' which made him an ollave after a very difficult twelve-year 
course. The position of the Irish bard is defined in the seventh-century 
Sequel to the Crith Gabhlach Law: 'A bard is one without lawful learning 
but his own intellect'; but in the later Book of Ollaves (bound up in the 
fourteenth-century Book of Ballymote) it is made clear that to have got as 
far as the seventh year of his poetic education entitled a student to the 
'failed B . A . ' dignity of bardism. He had memorized only half the pre-
scribed tales and poems, had not studied advanced prosody and metrical 
22 
composition, and was deficient in knowledge of Old Goide l i c However , 
the seven years' course that he had taken was a great deal more severe 
than that insisted upon in the poetic schools of Wales, where the bards 
had a proportionately lower status. According to the Welsh Laws , the 
Penkerdd, or Chief Bard, was only the tenth dignitary at Court and sat on 
the left of the Heir Apparent, being reckoned equal in honour with the 
Chief Smith. 
The Irish ollave's chief interest was the refinement of complex poetic 
truth to exact statement. He knew the history and mythic value of every 
word he used and can have cared nothing for the ordinary man's apprecia-
tion of his work; he valued only the judgement of his colleagues, whom 
he seldom met without a lively exchange of poetic wit in extempore verse. 
Ye t it cannot be pretended that he was always true to the Theme. His 
education, which was a very general one, including history, music, law, 
science and divination, encouraged him to versify in all these depart-
ments of knowledge; so that often Ogma the G o d of Eloquence seemed 
more important than Brigit, the Three-fold Muse. And it is a paradox 
that in mediaeval Wales the admired court-poet had become a client of the 
prince to whom he addressed formal begging odes and forgotten the 
Theme almost entirely; while the despised and unendowed minstrel who 
seemed to be a mere gleeman showed the greater poetic integrity, even 
though his verse was not so highly polished. 
The Anglo-Saxons had no sacrosanct master-poets, but only gleemen; 
and English poetic lore is borrowed at third hand, by way of the Norman 
French romances, from ancient British, Gallic and Irish sources. This 
explains why there is not the same instinctive reverence for the name of 
poet in the English countryside as there is in the remotest parts of Wales, 
Ireland and the Highlands. English poets feel obliged to apologize for their 
calling except when moving in literary circles; they describe themselves 
to the registrar, or when giving evidence in a law-court, as civil ser-
vants, journalists, schoolmasters, novelists, or whatever else they happen 
to be besides poets. Even the English poet-laureateship was not instituted 
until the reign of Charles I. (John Skelton's laurel-crown was a university 
award for Latin eloquence unconnected with Henry VILI 's patronage of 
him as a poet.) It does not carry with it any authority over national 
poetic practice or any obligation to preserve the decencies of poetry, and 
is awarded, without a contest, by the First Lord of the Treasury, not by 
any learned society. Nevertheless many English poets have written 
with exquisite technical skill, and since the twelfth century no genera-
tion has been entirely faithless to the Theme. The fact is that though 
the Anglo-Saxons broke the power of the ancient British chieftains and 
poets they did not exterminate the peasants, so that the continuity of 
the ancient British festal system remained unaffected even when the 
23 
Anglo-Saxons professed Christianity. English social life was based on 
agriculture, grazing, and hunting, not on industry, and the Theme was 
still everywhere implicit in the popular celebration of the festivals now 
known as Candlemas, L a d y Day , May Day , Midsummer D a y , Lammas, 
Michaelmas, All-Hallowe'en, and Christmas; it was also secretly preserved 
as religious doctrine in the covens of the anti-Christian witch-cult. Thus 
the English, though with no traditional respect for the poet, have a tradi-
tional awareness of the Theme. 
The Theme, briefly, is the antique story, which falls into thirteen 
chapters and an epilogue, of the birth, life, death and resurrection of the 
G o d of the Waxing Year ; the central chapters concern the God ' s losing 
battle with the God of the Waning Year for love of the capricious and all-
powerful Threefold Goddess, their mother, bride and layer-out. The poet 
identifies himself with the God of the Waxing Year and his Muse with the 
Goddess; the rival is his blood-brother, his other self, his weird. All true 
poetry—true by Housman's practical test—celebrates some incident or 
scene in this very ancient story, and the three main characters are so much 
a part of our racial inheritance that they not only assert themselves in 
poetry but recur on occasions of emotional stress in the form of dreams, 
paranoiac visions and delusions. The weird, or rival, often appears in 
nightmare as the tall, lean, dark-faced bed-side spectre, or Prince of the 
Air , who tries to drag the dreamer out through the window, so that he 
looks back and sees his body still lying rigid in bed; but he takes countless 
other malevolent or diabolic or serpent-like forms. 
The Goddess is a lovely, slender woman with a hooked nose, deathly 
pale face, lips red as rowan-berries, startlinglyblue eyes and long fair 
hair; she will suddenly transform herself into sow, mare, bitch, vixen, 
she-ass, weasel, serpent, owl, she-wolf, tigress, mermaid or loathsome 
hag. Her names and titles are innumerable. In ghost stories she often 
figures as 'The White Lady ' , and in ancient religions, from the British 
Isles to the Caucasus, as the 'White Goddess' . I cannot think of any true 
poet from Homer onwards who has not independently recorded his 
experience of her. The test of a poet's vision, one might say, is the 
accuracy of his portrayal of the White Goddess and of the island over 
which she rules. The reason why the hairs stand on end, the eyes water, 
the throat is constricted, the skin crawls and a shiver runs down the spine 
when one writes or reads a true poem is that a true poem is necessarily an 
invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, the Mother of All Living, the 
ancient power of fright and lust—the female spider or the queen-bee 
whose embrace is death. Housman offered a secondary test of true poetry: 
whether it matches a phrase of Keats's, 'everything that reminds me of 
her goes through me like a spear'. This is equally pertinent to the Theme. 
Keats was writing under the shadow of death about his Muse, Fanny 
24 
Brawne; and the 'spear that roars for blood' is the traditional weapon of 
the dark executioner and supplanter. 
Sometimes, in reading a poem, the hairs will bristle at an apparently 
unpeopled and eventless scene described in it, if the elements bespeak her 
unseen presence clearly enough: for example, when owls hoot, the moon 
rides like a ship through scudding cloud, trees sway slowly together above 
a rushing waterfall, and a distant barking of dogs is heard; or when a peal 
of bells in frosty weather suddenly announces the birth of the N e w Year . 
Despite the deep sensory satisfaction to be derived from Classical 
poetry, it never makes the hair rise and the heart leap, except where it 
fails to maintain decorous composure; and this is because of the difference 
between the attitudes of the Classical poet, and of the true poet, to the 
White Goddess. This is not to identify the true poet with the Romantic 
poet. 'Romantic' , a useful word while it covered the reintroduction into 
Western Europe, by the writers of verse-romances, of a mystical reverence 
for woman, has become tainted by indiscriminate use. The typical Roman-
tic poet of the nineteenth century was physically degenerate, or ailing, 
addicted to drugs and melancholia, critically unbalanced and a true poet 
only in his fatalistic regard for the Goddess as the mistress who com-
manded his destiny. The Classical poet, however gifted and industrious, 
fails to pass the test because he claims to be the Goddess's master—she is 
his mistress only in the derogatory sense of one who lives in coquettish 
ease under his protection. Sometimes, indeed, he is her bawdmaster: he 
attempts to heighten the appeal of his lines by studding them with 
'beauties' borrowed from true poems. In Classical Arabic poetry there is 
a device known as 'kindling' in which the poet induces the poetic atmos-
phere with a luscious prologue about groves, streams and nightingales, 
and then quickly, before it disperses, turns to the real business in hand— 
a flattering account, say, of the courage, piety and magnanimity of his 
patron or sage reflexions on the shortness and uncertainty of human life. 
In Classical English poetry the artificial kindling process is often pro-
tracted to the full length of the piece. 
The following chapters will rediscover a set of sacred charms of varying 
antiquity in which successive versions of the Theme are summarized. 
Literary critics whose function it is to judge all literature by gleeman 
standards—its entertainment value to the masses—can be counted upon 
to make merry with what they can only view as my preposterous group 
of mares' nests. And the scholars can be counted upon to refrain from any 
comment whatsoever. But, after all, what is a scholar? One who may not 
break bounds under pain of expulsion from the academy of which he is a 
member. 
And what is a mare's nest? Shakespeare hints at the answer, though he 
substitutes St. Swithold for Odin, the original hero of the ballad: 
Switholdfooted thrice the wold 
He met the Night-Mare and her nine-fold, 
Bid her alight and her troth plight, 
And aroynt thee, witch, aroynt thee! 
A fuller account of Odin's feat is given in the North Country Charm 
against the Night Mare, which probably dates from the fourteenth 
century: 
Tha mon o' micht, he rade o' nicht 
Wi'neider swerd neferdne licht. 
He socht tha Mare, he fond tha Mare, 
He bond tha Mare wi' her ain hare, 
Ond gared her swar by midder-micht 
She wolde nae mair rido' nicht 
Whar aince he rade, thot mon o' micht. 
T h e Night Mare is one of the cruellest aspects of the White Goddess. 
Her nests, when one comes across them in dreams, lodged in rock-clefts 
or the branches of enormous hollow yews, are built of carefully chosen 
twigs, lined with white horse-hair and the plumage of prophetic birds and 
littered with the jaw-bones and entrails of poets. The prophet J o b said of 
her: 'She dwelleth and abideth upon the rock. Her young ones also suck 
up blood.' 
26 
Chapter Two 
THE B A T T L E OF THE TREES 
It seems that the Welsh minstrels, like the Irish poets, recited their traditional romances in prose, breaking into dramatic verse, with harp accompaniment, only at points of emotional stress. Some of these 
romances survive complete with the incidental verses; others have lost 
them; in some cases, such as the romance of Llywarch Hen, only the 
verses survive. The most famous Welsh collection is the Mabinogion, 
which is usually explained as 'Juvenile Romances', that is to say those 
that every apprentice to the minstrel profession was expected to know; it is 
contained in the thirteenth-century Red Book of Hergest. Almost all 
the incidental verses are lost. These romances are the stock-in-trade of a 
minstrel and some of them have been brought more up-to-date than others 
in their language and description of manners and morals. 
The Red Book of Hergest also contains a jumble of fifty-eight poems, 
called The Book of Taliesin, among which occur the incidental verses of a 
Romance of Taliesin which is not included in the Mabinogion. However , 
the first part of the romance is preserved in a late sixteenth-century manu-
script, called the 'Peniardd M.S. ' , first printed in the early nineteenth-
century Myvyrian Archaiology, complete with many of the same incidental 
verses, though with textual variations. Lady Charlotte Guest translated 
this fragment, completing it with material from two other manuscripts, 
and included it in her well-known edition of the Mabinogion (1848). 
Unfortunately, one of the two manuscripts came from the library of Iolo 
Morganwg, a celebrated eighteenth-century ' improver' of Welsh docu-
ments, so that her version cannot be read with confidence, though it has 
not been proved that this particular manuscript was forged. 
The gist of the romance is as follows. A nobleman of Penllyn named 
Tegid Voel had a wife named Caridwen, or Cerridwen, and two children, 
Creirwy, the most beautiful girl in the world, and Afagddu, the ugliest 
boy. T h e y lived on an island in the middle of Lake Tegid . To compensate 
for Afagddu's ugliness, Cerridwen decided to make him highly intelli-
gent. So , according to a recipe contained in the books of Vergil of Toledo 
the magician (hero of a twelfth-century romance), she boiled Up a cauldron 
of inspiration and knowledge, which had to be kept on the simmer for a 
27 
year and a day. Season by season, she added to the brew magical herbs 
gathered in their correct planetary hours. While she gathered the herbs 
she put litde Gwion , the son of Gwreang, of the parish of Llanfair in 
Caereinion, to stir thecauldron. Towards the end of the year three burn-
ing drops flew out and fell on little Gwion 's finger. He thrust it into his 
mouth and at once understood the nature and meaning of all things past, 
present and future, and thus saw the need of guarding against the wiles of 
Cerridwen who was determined on killing him as soon as he had completed 
his work. He fled away, and she pursued him like a black screaming hag. 
By use of the powers that he had drawn from the cauldron he changed 
himself into a hare; she changed herself into a greyhound. He plunged into 
a river and became a fish; she changed herself into an otter. He flew up 
into the air like a bird; she changed herself into a hawk. He became a 
grain of winnowed wheat on the floor of a barn; she changed herself into 
a black hen, scratched the wheat over with her feet, found him and 
swallowed him. When she returned to her own shape she found herself 
pregnant of Gwion and nine months later bore him as a child. She could 
not find it in her heart to kill him, because he was very beautiful, so tied 
him in a leather bag and threw him into the sea two days before May Day . 
He was carried into the weir of Gwyddno Garanhair near D o v e y and 
Aberystwyth, in Cardigan Bay, and rescued from it by Prince Elphin, the 
son of Gwyddno and nephew of King Maelgwyn of Gwynedd (North 
Wales), who had come there to net fish. Elphin, though he caught no fish, 
considered himself well rewarded for his labour and renamed Gwion 
'Taliesin', meaning either 'fine value', or 'beautiful b row '—a subject for 
punning by the author of the romance. 
When Elphin was imprisoned by his royal uncle at D y g a n w y (near 
Llandudno), the capital of "Gwynedd, the child Taliesin went there to 
rescue him and by a display of wisdom, in which he confounded all the 
twenty-four court-bards of Maelgwyn—the eighth-century British his-
torian Nennius mentions Maelgwyn's sycophantic bards—and their leader 
the chief bard Heinin, secured the prince's release. First he put a magic 
spell on the bards so that they could only play blerwm blerwm with their 
fingers on their lips like children, and then he recited a long riddling poem, 
the Hones Taliesin, which they were unable to understand, and which will 
be found in Chapter V. Since the Peniardd version of the romance is 
not complete, it is just possible that the solution of the riddle was 
eventually given, as in the similar romances of Rumpelstiltskin, T o m 
Ti t To t , Oedipus, and Samson. But the other incidental poems suggest 
that Taliesin continued to ridicule the ignorance and stupidity of Heinin 
and the other bards to the end and never revealed his secret. 
The climax of the story in Lady Charlotte's version comes with another 
riddle, proposed by the child Taliesin, beginning: 
28 
Discover what it is: 
The strong creature from before the Flood 
Withoutflesh, without bone, 
Without vein, without blood, 
Without head, without feet... 
In field, in forest... 
Without hand, without foot. 
It is also as wide 
As the surface of the earth, 
And it was not born, 
Nor was it seen... 
The solution, namely 'The Wind ' , is given practically with a violent 
storm of wind which frightens the King into fetching Elphin from the 
dungeon, whereupon Taliesin unchains him with an incantation. Probably 
in an earlier version the wind was released from the mantle of his comrade 
Afagddu or Morvran, as it was by Morvran's Irish counterpart Marvan in 
the early mediaeval Proceedings of the Grand Bardic Academy, with 
which The Romance of Taliesin has much in common. 'A part of it blew 
into the bosom of every bard present, so that they all rose to their feet.' A 
condensed form of this riddle appears in the Flores of Bede, an author 
commended in one of the Book of Taliesin poems: 
Die mihi quae est ilia res quae caelum, totamque terram replevit, silvas 
et sirculos confringit . . . omnia-que fundamenta concutit, sed nec oculis 
videri aut [sic] manibus tangipotest. 
[Answer] Ventus. 
There can be no mistake here. But since the Hanes Taliesin is not preceded 
by any formal Dychymig Dychymig ('riddle me this riddle') or Dechymic 
pwy yw ( 'Discover what it i s ' ) 1 commentators excuse themselves from 
reading it as a riddle at all. Some consider it to be solemn-sounding non-
sense, an early anticipation of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, intended 
to raise a laugh; others consider that it has some sort of mystical sense 
connected with the Druidical doctrine of the transmigration of souls, but 
do not claim to be able to elucidate this. 
Here I must apologize for my temerity in writing on a subject which is 
not really my own. I am not a Welshman, except an honorary one through 
eating the leek on St. David 's D a y while serving with the Roya l Welch 
Fusiliers and, though I have lived in Wales for some years, off and on, 
1 Another form is dychymig damtg ('a riddle, a riddle'), which seems to explain the mysteri-
ous ducdame ducdame in As You Like It, which Jaques describes as 'a Greek invocation to call 
fools into a circle'—perhaps a favourite joke of Shakespeare's Welsh schoolmaster, re-
membered for its oddity. 
*9 
have no command even of modern Welsh; and I am not a mediaeval 
historian. But my profession is poetry, and I agree with the Welsh 
minstrels that the poet's first enrichment is a knowledge and understand-
ing of myths. One day while I was puzzling out the meaning of the 
ancient Welsh myth of Cdd Goddeu ( 'The Battle of the Trees ' ) , fought 
between Arawn King of Annwm ( 'The Bottomless Place') , and the two 
sons of Don, Gwydion and Amathaon, I had much the same experience 
as Gwion of Llanfair. A drop or two of the brew of Inspiration flew out 
of the cauldron and I suddenly felt confident that if I turned again to 
Gwion 's riddle, which I had not read since I was a schoolboy, I could 
make sense of it. 
This Batde of the Trees was 'occasioned by a Lapwing, a White R o e -
buck and a Whelp from Annwm. ' In the ancient Welsh Triads, which are 
a collection of sententious or historical observations arranged epigram-
matically in threes, it is reckoned as one of the 'Three Frivolous Batdes of 
Britain'. And the Romance of Taliesin contains a long poem, or group of 
poems run together, called Cdd Goddeu, the verses of which seem as non-
sensical as the Hanes Taliesin because they have been deliberately 'pied'. 
Here is the .poem in D. W. Nash's mid-Victorian translation, said to be 
unreliable but the best at present available. The original is written in short 
rhyming lines, the same rhyme often being sustained for ten or fifteen 
lines. Less than half of them belong to the poem which gives its name to 
the whole medley, and these must be laboriously sorted before their 
relevance to Gwion 's riddle can be explained. Patience! 
C A D G O D D E U 
(The Battle of the Trees) 
/ have been in many shapes, 
Before I attained a congenial form. 
J have been a narrow blade of a sword. 
(I will believe it when it appears.) 
5 / have been a drop in the air. 
I have been a shining star. 
I have been a word in a book. 
I have been a book originally. 
I have been a light in a lantern. 
10 A year and a half. 
I have been a bridge for passing over 
Three-score rivers. 
I have journeyed as an eagle. 
I have been a boat on the sea. 
15 I have been a director in battle. 
30 
I have been the string of a child's swaddling clout. 
I have been a sword in the hand. 
I have been a shield in the fight. 
I have been the string of a harp, 
20 Enchanted for ayear 
In the foam ofwater. 
I have been a poker in the fire. 
I have been a tree in a covert. 
There is nothing in which I have not been. 
25 I have fought, though small, 
In the Battle of Goddeu Brig, 
Before the Ruler of Britain, 
Abounding in fleets. 
Indifferent bards pretend, 
30 They pretend a monstrous beast, 
With a hundred heads, 
Anda grievous combat 
At the root of the tongue. 
And another fight there is 
35 At the back of the head. 
A toad having on his thighs 
A hundred claws, 
A spotted crested snake, 
For punishing in their flesh 
40 A hundred souls on account of their sins. 
I was in Caer Fefynedd, 
Thither were hastening grasses and trees. 
Wayfarers perceive them, 
Wirriors are astonished 
45 At a renewal ofthe conflicts 
Such as Gwydion made. 
There is calling on Heaven, 
And on Christ that he would effect 
Their deliverance, 
50 The all-powerful Lord. 
If the Lord had answered, 
Through charms and magic skill, 
Assume the forms of the principal trees, 
With you in array 
5 5 Restrain the people 
Inexperienced in battle. 
When the trees were enchanted 
There was hope for the tressj 
3 1 
That they should frustrate the intention 
60 Of the surroundingfires.... 
Better are three in unison, 
And enjoying themselves in a circle, 
And one of them relating 
The story of the deluge, 
65 And ofthe cross of Christ, 
And ofthe Day ofJudgement near at hand. 
The alder-trees in the first line, 
They made the commencement. 
Willow and quicken tree, 
70 They were slow in their array. 
The plum is a tree 
Not beloved of men; 
The medlar of a like nature, 
Overcoming severe toil. 
75 The bean bearing in its shade 
An army of phantoms. 
The raspberry makes 
Not the best of food. 
In shelter live, 
80 The privet and the woodbine, 
And the ivy in its season. 
Great is the gorse in battle. 
The cherry-tree had been reproached. 
The birch, though very magnanimous, 
8 5 Was late in arraying himself; 
It was not through cowardice, 
But on account of his great sqe. 
The appearance of the . . . 
Is that ofa foreigner and a savage. 
90 The pine-tree in the court, 
Strong in battle, 
By me greatly exalted 
In the presence of kings, 
The elm-trees are his subjects. 
95 He turns not aside the measure of a foot, 
But strikes right in the middle, 
And at the farthest end. 
The ha^elis the judge, 
His berries are thy dowry. 
100 The privet is blessed. 
Strong chiefs in war 
3 * 
Are the . . . and the mulberry. 
Prosperous the beech-tree. 
The holly dark green, 
105 He was very courageous: 
Defended with spikes on every side, 
Wioundxng the hands. 
The long-enduring poplars 
Very much broken in fight. 
no The plundered fern; 
The brooms with their offspring: 
Thefuije was not well behaved 
Until he was tamed. 
The heath was giving consolation, 
1 1 5 Comforting the people. 
The black cherry-tree was pursuing. 
The oak- tree swiftly moving, 
Before him tremble heaven and earth, 
Stout doorkeeper against the foe 
120 Is his name in all lands. 
The corn-cockle bound together, 
Wiis given to be burnt. 
Others were rejected 
On account of the holes made 
125 By great violence 
In the field of battle. 
Very wrathful the . . . 
Cruel the gloomy ash. 
Bashful the chestnut-tree, 
130 Retreating from happiness. 
There shall be a black darkness, 
There shall be a shaking of the mountain, 
There shall be a purifying furnace, 
There shallfirst be a great wave, 
135 And when the shout shall be heard— 
Putting forth new leaves are the tops ofthe beech, 
Changing form and being renewed from a witheredst 
Entangled are the tops of the oak. 
From the Gorchan of Maelderw. 
140 Smiling at the side of the rock 
{Was) the pear-tree not ofan ardent nature. 
Neither ofmother or father, 
When I was made, 
Was my blood or body; 
33 
145 Of rune kinds of faculties, 
Of fruit of fruits, 
Of fruit God made me, 
Of the blossom ofthe mountain primrose, 
Ofthe buds of trees and shrubs, 
150 Of earth of earthly kind. 
When I was made 
Of the blossoms of the nettle, 
Of the water of the ninth wave, 
I was spell-bound by Math 
155 Before I became immortal. 
I was spell-bound by Gwydion, 
Great enchanter of the Britons, 
OfEurys, ofEurwn, 
Of Euron, of Medron, 
160 In myriads of secrets, 
I am as learned as Math.... 
I know about the Emperor 
'When he was half burnt. 
I know the star-knowledge 
165 Of stars before the earth (was made), 
Whence I was born, 
How many worlds there are. 
It is the custom of accomplished bards 
To recite the praise of their country. 
170 I have played in Lloughor, 
I have slept in purple. 
Was I not in the enclosure 
With Dylan Ail MOT, 
On a couch in the centre 
175 Between the two knees of the prince 
Upon two blunt spears? 
When from heaven came 
The torrents into the deep, 
Rushing with violent impulse. 
180 (/ know) four-score songs, 
For administering to their pleasure. 
There is neither old nor young, 
Except me as to their poems, 
Any other singer who knows the whole of the nine hundred 
185 Which are known to me, 
Concerning the blood-spotted sword. 
Honour is my guide. 
34 
Profitable learning is from the Lord. 
(I know) of the slaying of the boar, 
190 Its appearing, its disappearing, 
Its knowledge of languages. 
(I know) the light whose name is Splendour, 
And the number of the ruling lights 
That scatter rays of fire 
195 High above the deep. 
I have been a spotted snake upon a hill; 
I have been a viper in a lake; 
I have been an evil star formerly. 
I have been a weight in a mill. (?) 
200 My cassock is red all over. 
I prophesy no evil. 
Four score puffs of smoke 
To everyone who will carry them away: 
And a million of angels, 
205 On the point of my knife. 
Handsome is the yellow horse, 
But a hundred times better 
Is my cream-coloured one, 
Swift as the sea-mew, 
210 Which cannot pass me 
Between the sea and the shore. 
Am I not pre-eminent in the field of blood? 
I have a hundred shares of the spoil. 
My wreath is ofred jewels, 
215 Of gold is the border of my shield. 
There has not been born one so good as I, 
Or ever known, 
Except Goronwy, 
From the dales of Edrywy. 
220 Long and white are my fingers, 
It is long since I was a herdsman. 
I travelled over the earth 
Before I became a learned person. 
I have travelled, I have made a circuit, 
225 / have slept in a hundred islands; 
I have dwelt in a hundred cities. 
Learned Druids, 
Prophesy ye ofArthur? 
Or is it me they celebrate, 
230 And the Crucifixion of Christ, 
35 
And the Day of Judgement near at hand, 
And one relating 
The history of the Deluge f 
With a golden jewel set in gold 
235 I am enriched; 
And I am indulging in pleasure 
Out of the oppressive toil of the goldsmith. 
With a little patience most of the lines that belong to the poem about 
the Battle of the Trees can be separated from the four or five other 
poems with which they are mixed. Here is a tentative restoration of the 
easier parts, with gaps left for the more difficult. The reasons that have 
led me to this solution will appear in due course as I discuss the meaning 
of the allusions contained in the poem. I use the ballad metre as the most 
suitable English equivalent of the original. 
T H E B A T T L E O F T H E T R E E S 
From my seat at Fefynedd, (lines 4 1 - 4 2 ) 
A city that is strong, 
I watched the trees and green things 
Hastening along. 
Wayfarers wondered, (lines 43—46) 
Warriors were dismayed 
At renewal of conflicts 
Such as Gwydion made, 
Under the tongue-root (lines 3 2 - 3 5 ) 
A fight most dread, 
And another raging 
Behind, in the head. 
The alders in the front line (lines 67-70) 
Began the affray. 
Willow and rowan-tree 
Were tardy in array. 
The holly, dark green, (lines 104 -107 ) 
Made a resolute stand; 
He is armed with many spear-points 
Wounding the hand. 
36 
With foot-beat ofthe swift oak (lines 1 1 7 - 1 2 0 ) 
Heaven and earth rung; 
'Stout Guardian of the Door 
His name in every tongue. 
Great was thegorse in battle, (lines 82, S i , 98, 57) 
And the ivy at his prime; 
The ha%el was arbiter 
At this charmed time. 
Uncouth and savage was the[fir?\ (lines 88, 89, 128, 95, 96) 
Cruel the ash-tree— 
Turns not aside afoot-breadth, 
Straightat the heart runs he. 
The birch, though very noble, (lines 84-87) 
Armed himself but late: 
A sign not of cowardice 
But of high estate. 
The heath gave consolation (lines 1 1 4 , 1 1 5 , 108, 109) 
To the tod-spent folk, 
The long-enduring poplars 
In battle much broke. 
Some of them were cast away (lines 123—126) 
On the field of fight 
Because of holes torn in them 
By the enemy's might. 
Very wrathful was the [vine ?] (lines 127 , 94, 92, 93) 
Whose henchmen are the elms; 
I exalt him mightily 
To rulers of realms. 
In shelter linger (lines 79, 80, 56, 90) 
Privet and woodbine 
Inexperienced in warfare; 
And the courtly pine. 
Little Gwion has made it clear that he does not offer this encounter as 
the original Cdd Goddeu but as: 
A renewal of conflicts 
Such as Gwydion made. 
37 
Commentators, confused by the pied verses, have for the most part 
been content to remark that in Celtic tradition the Druids were credited 
with the magical power of transforming trees into warriors and sending 
them into battle. But, as the R e v . Edward Davies , a brilliant but hope-
lessly erratic Welsh scholar of the early nineteenth century, first noted in 
his Celtic Researches (1809), the battle described by Gwion is not a frivo-
lous battle, or a battle physically fought, but a battle fought intellectually 
in the heads and with the tongues of the learned. Davies also noted that 
in all Celtic languages trees means letters; that the Druidic colleges were 
founded in woods or groves; that a great part of the Druidic mysteries 
was concerned with twigs of different sorts; and that the most ancient 
Irish alphabet, the Beth-Luis-Nion ( 'Birch-Rowan-Ash ' ) takes its name 
from the first three of a series of trees whose initials form the sequence of 
its letters. Davies was on the right track and though he soon went 
astray because, not realizing that the poems were pied, he mistranslated 
them into what he thought was good sense, his observations help us to 
restore the text of the passage referring to the hastening green things and 
trees: 
Retreating from happiness, (lines 130 and 53) 
They would fain be set 
Informs of the chief letters 
Of the alphabet. 
T h e following lines seem to form an introduction to his account of the 
battle: 
The tops of the beech-tree (lines 1 3 6 - 1 3 7 ) 
Have sprouted of late, 
Are changed and renewed 
From their withered state. 
When the beech prospers, (lines 103, 52, 138, 58) 
Though spells and litanies 
The oak-tops entangle, 
There is hope for trees. 
This means, if anything, that there had been a recent revival of letters 
in Wales. 'Beech' is a common synonym for 'literature'. The English 
word 'book' , for example, comes from a Gothic word meaning letters 
and, like the German buchstabe, is etymologically connected with the 
word 'beech'—the reason being that writing tablets were made of beech. 
As Venantius Fortunatus, the sixth-century bishop-poet, wrote: Barbara 
fraxineis pingatur runa tabellis—'Let the barbarian rune be marked on 
beechwood tablets.' The 'tangled oak-tops' must refer to the ancient 
38 
poetic mysteries: as has already been mentioned, the derwydd, or Druid, 
or poet, was an 'oak-seer'. An early Cornish poem describes how the 
Druid Merddin, or Merlin, went early in the morning with his black dog 
to seek the glain, or magical snake's-egg (probably a fossiled sea-urchin 
of the sort found in Iron A g e burials), cull cresses and samolus (herbe d'or), 
and cut the highest twig from the top of the oak. Gwion , who in line 225 
addresses his fellow-poets as Druids, is saying here: 'The ancient poetic 
mysteries have been reduced to a tangle by the Church's prolonged 
hostility, but they have a hopeful future, now that literature is prospering 
outside the monasteries.' 
He mentions other participants in the battle: 
Strong chiefs in war 
Are the [ i ] and mulberry.... 
The cherry had been slighted.... 
The black cherry was pursuing.... 
The pear that is not ardent.... 
The raspberry that makes 
Not the best of foods.... 
The plum is a tree 
Unbeloved of men.... 
The medlar of like nature . 
None of these mentions makes good poetic sense. Raspberry is excel-
lent food; the plum is a popular tree; pear-wood is so ardent that in the 
Balkans it is often used as a substitute for cornel to kindle the ritual need-
fire; the mulberry is not used as a weapon-tree; the cherry was never 
slighted and in Gwion ' s day was connected with the Nativity story in a 
popular version of the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew; and the black cherry 
does not 'pursue' . It is pretty clear that these eight names of orchard 
fruits, and another which occupied the place that I have filled with 'fir', 
have been mischievously robbed from the next riddling passage in the 
poem: 
Ofnine kinds of faculty, 
O[fruits of fruit, 
Of fruit Godm ide me.... 
and have been substituted for the names of nine forest trees that did 
engage in the fight. 
It is hard to decide whether the story of the fruit man belongs to the 
Battle of the Trees poem, or whether it is a 'Here come F speech like the 
39 
four others muddled up in the Cdd Goddeu, of whom the speakers are 
evidently Taliesin, the Flower-goddess Blodeuwedd, Hu Gadarn the 
ancestor of the Cymry , and the G o d Apol lo . On the whole, I think it 
does belong to the Battle of the Trees: 
With nine sorts of faculty 
God has gifted me: 
1 am fruit of fruits gathered 
From nine sorts of tree— 
Plum, quince, whortle, mulberry, 
Raspberry, pear, 
Black cherry and white 
With the sorb in me share. 
By a study of the trees of the Irish Beth-Luis-Nion tree-alphabet, with 
which the author of the poem was clearly familiar, it is easy to restore the 
original nine trees which have been replaced with the fruit names. We can 
be sure that it is the sloe that 'makes not the best of foods'; the elder, a 
notoriously bad wood for fuel and a famous country remedy for fevers, 
scalds and burns, that is 'not ardent'; the unlucky whitethorn, and the 
blackthorn 'of like nature', that are 'unbeloved of men' and, with the 
archer's yew, are the 'strong chiefs in war ' . A n d on the analogy of the oak 
from which reverberating clubs were made, the yew from which deadly 
bows and dagger-handles were made, the ash from which sure-thrusting 
spears were made, and the poplar from which long-enduring shields 
were made, I suggest that the original of 'the black cherry was pursuing' 
was the restless reed from which swift-flying arrow-shafts were made. 
The reed was reckoned a 'tree' by the Irish poets. 
T h e T who was slighted because he was not big is Gwion himself, 
whom Heinin and his fellow-bards scoffed at for his childish appearance; 
but he is perhaps speaking in the character of still another tree—the 
mistletoe, which in the Norse legend killed Balder the Sun-god after 
having been slighted as too young to take the oath not to harm him. 
Although in ancient Irish religion there is no trace of a misdetoe cult, 
and the mistletoe does not figure in the Beth-Luis-Nion, to the Gallic 
Druids who relied on Britain for their doctrine it was the most important 
of all trees, and remains of mistletoe have been found in conjunction with 
oak-branches in a Bronze A g e tree-coffin burial at Gristhorpe near Scar-
borough in Yorkshire. Gwion may therefore be relying here on a British 
tradition of the original Cdd Goddeu rather than on his Irish learning. 
T h e remaining tree-references in the poem are these: 
The broom with its children.... 
40 
(lines 1 4 5 - 1 4 7 ) 
(lines 7 1 , 73 , 77, 83, 
102, 1 1 6 , 1 4 1 ) 
Thejur^e not well behaved 
Until he was tamed.... 
Bashful the chestnut-tree.... 
The furze is tamed by the Spring-fires which make its young shoots 
edible for sheep. 
The bashful chestnut does not belong to the same category of letter 
trees as those that took part in the batde; probablythe line in which it 
occurs is part of another of the poems included in Cad Goddeu, which 
describes how the lovely Blodeuwedd ('Flower-aspect') was conjured by 
the wizard Gwydion , from buds and blossoms. This poem is not difficult 
to separate from the rest of Cad Goddeu, though one or two lines seem to 
be missing. They can be supplied from the parallel lines: 
Ofnine kinds of faculties, (lines 1 4 5 - 1 4 7 ) 
Of fruits of fruit, 
Of fruit God made me. 
The fruit man is created from nine kinds of fruit; the flower woman must 
have been created from nine kinds of flower. F ive are given in Cad 
Goddeu; three more—broom, meadow-sweet and oak-blossom—in the 
account of the same event in the Romance of Math the Son of Mathonwy, 
and the ninth is likely to have been the hawthorn, because Blodeuwedd is 
another name for Olwen, the May-queen, daughter (according to the 
Romance of Kilhwych and Olwen) of the Hawthorn, or Whitethorn, or 
May Tree; but it may have been the white-flowering trefoil. 
H A N E S B L O D E U W E D D 
Not of father nor ofmother line 142 
Was my blood, was my body. 144 
I was spellbound by Gwydion, 156 
Prime enchanter of the Britons, 157 
When he formed me from nine blossoms, M3 
Nine buds of various kind: 149 
From primrose of the mountain, 148 
Broom, meadow-sweet and cockle, 121 
Together intertwined, 
From the bean in its shade bearing 75 
A white spectral army 76 
Of earth, of earthly kind, 150 
From blossoms of the nettle, 
Oak, thorn and bashful chestnut— 129 
Nine powers of nine flowers, [146 
Nine powers in me combined, 
4i 
Nine buds of plant and tree. 
Long and white are myfingers 
As the ninth wave of the sea. 
149 
' 5 3 
In Wales and Ireland primroses are reckoned fairy flowers and in Eng -
lish folk tradition represent wantonness (cf. 'the primrose path of dalliance' 
—Hamlet; the 'primrose of her wantonness'—Brathwait's Golden Fleece). 
So Milton's 'yellow-skirted fayes' wore primrose. 'Cockles ' are the 'tares' 
of the Parable that the Devi l sowed in the wheat; and the bean is tradi-
tionally associated with ghosts—the Greek and Roman homoeopathic 
remedy against ghosts was to spit beans at them—and Pliny in his Natural 
History records the belief that the souls of the dead reside in beans. 
According to the Scottish poet Montgomerie (1605), witches rode on 
bean-stalks to their sabbaths. 
To return to the Battle of the Trees. Though the fern was reckoned a 
'tree' by the Irish poets, the 'plundered fern' is probably a reference to 
fern-seed which makes invisible and confers other magical powers. The 
twice-repeated 'privet' is suspicious. The privet figures unimportandy 
in Irish poetic tree-lore; it is never regarded as 'blessed'. Probably its 
second occurrence in line 100 is a disguise of the wild-apple, which is the 
tree most likely to smile from beside the rock, emblem of security: for 
Olwen, the laughing Aphrodite of Welsh legend, is always connected 
with the wild-apple. In line 99 'his berries are thy dowry ' is absurdly 
juxtaposed to the hazel. Only two fruit-trees could be said to dower a 
bride in Gwion 's day: the churchyard yew whose berries fell at the 
church porch where marriages were always celebrated, and the church-
yard rowan, often substituted for the yew in Wales. I think the y e w is 
here intended; yew-berries were prized for their sticky sweetness. In the 
tenth-century Irish poem, King and Hermit, Marvan the brother of K ing 
Guare of Connaught commends them highly as food. 
The remaining stanzas of the poem may now be tentatively restored: 
I have plundered the fern, 
Through all secrets I spy, 
(lines n o , 160, and 1 6 1 ) 
Old Math ap Mathonwy 
Knew no more than I. 
Strong chieftains were the blackthorn (lines 1 0 1 , 7 1 - 7 3 , 77 
With his ill fruit, and 78) 
The unbeloved whitethorn 
Who wears the same suit. 
The swift-pursuing reed, (lines 1 1 6 , 1 1 1 - 1 1 3 ) 
The broom with his brood, 
42 
And thefuije but ill-behaved 
Until he is subdued. 
The dower-scattering yew (lines 97, 99, 128, 1 4 1 , 60) 
Stood glum at the fight's fringe, 
With the elder slow to burn 
Amidfires that singe, 
And the blessed wild apple (lines 100, 139, and 140) 
Laughing for pride 
From the Gorchan of Maelderw, 
By the rock side. 
But I, although slighted (lines 83, 54, 25, 26) 
Because I was not big, 
Fought, trees, in your array 
On the field of Goddeu Brig. 
The broom may not seem a warlike tree, but in Gratius's Genistae 
Altinates the tall white broom is said to have been much used in ancient 
times for the staves of spears and darts: these are probably the 'brood*. 
Goddeu Brig means Tree-tops, which has puzzled critics who hold that 
the Cad Goddeu was a battle fought in Goddeu, 'Trees ' , the Welsh name 
for Shropshire. The Gorchan of Maelderw ('the incantation of Maelderw') 
was a long poem attributed to the sixth-century poet Taliesin, who is 
said to have particularly prescribed it as a classic to his bardic colleagues. 
The apple-tree was a symbol of poetic immortality, which is why it is 
here presented as growing out of this incantation of Taliesin's. 
Here, to anticipate my argument by several chapters, is the Order of 
Battle in the Cad Goddeu: 
Birch Rowan Alder Wil low Ash 
Whitethorn Oak Holly Hazel Wild-apple 
Vine I v y J Reed Blackthorn Elder 
[Broom 
Palm Fir J G o r s e Heath Poplar Y e w Mistletoe 
[Furze 
Privet Woodbine Pine 
It should be added that in the original, between the lines numbered 
60 and 6 1 , occur eight lines unintelligible to D. W. Nash: beginning with 
'the chieftains are falling' and ending with 'blood of men up to the 
buttocks'. They may or may not belong to the Battle of the Trees. 
I leave the other pieces included in this medley to be sorted out by 
someone else. Besides the monologues of Blodeuwedd, Hu Gadarn and 
Apol lo , there is a satire on monkish theologians, who sit in a circle gloomily 
enjoying themselves with prophecies of the imminent D a y of Judgement 
(lines 62-66), the black darkness, the shaking of the mountain, the 
purifying furnace (lines 1 3 1 - 1 3 4 ) , damning men's souls by the hundred 
(lines 39-40) and pondering the absurd problems of the Schoolmen: 
Room for a million angels (lines 204, 205) 
On my knife-point, it appears. 
Then room for how many worlds (lines 167 and 176) 
A-top of two blunt spears? 
This introduces a boast of Gwion 's own learning: 
But I prophesy no evil, (lines 201, 200) 
My cassock is wholly red. 
'He knows the Nine Hundred Tales'— (line 184) 
Of whom but me is it said? 
Red was the most honourable colour for dressamong the ancient Welsh, 
according to the twelfth-century poet Cynddelw; Gwion is contrasting it 
with the dismal dress of the monks. Of the Nine Hundred Tales he men-
tions only two, both of which are included in the Red Book of Hergest: 
the Hunting of the Twrch Trwyth (line 189) and the Dream of Maxen 
Wkdig (lines 1 6 2 - 3 ) . 
Lines 206 to 2 1 1 belong, it seems, to Can y Meirch, 'The Song of the 
Horses', another of the Gwion poems, which refers to a race between the 
horses of Elphin and Maelgwyn which is an incident in the Romance. 
One most interesting sequence can be built up from lines 2 9 - 3 2 , 3 6 - 3 7 
and 2 3 4 - 2 3 7 : 
Indifferent bards pretend, 
They pretend a monstrous beast, 
With a hundred heads, 
A spotted crested snake, 
A toad having on his thighs 
A hundred claws, 
With a golden jewel set in gold 
I am enriched; 
And indulged in pleasure 
By the oppressive toil of the goldsmith. 
Since Gwion identifies himself with these bards, they are, I think, de-
scribed as 'indifferent' by way of irony. T h e hundred-headed serpent 
watching over the jewelled Garden of the Hesperides, and the hundred-
44 
clawed toad wearing a precious jewel in his head (mentioned by Shake-
speare's Duke Senior) both belonged to the ancient toadstool mysteries, 
of whichGwion seems to have been an adept. The European mysteries 
are less fully explored than their Mexican counterpart; but Mr. and Mrs. 
Gordon Wasson and Professor Heim show that the pre-Columbian 
Toadstool-god Tlal6c, represented as a toad with a serpent head-dress, 
has for thousands of years presided at the communal eating of the hal-
lucigenic toadstool psilocybe: a feast that gives visions of transcendental 
beauty. Tlaloc's European counterpart, Dionysus, shares too many of 
his mythical attributes for coincidence: they must be versions of the same 
deity; though at what period cultural contact took place between the 
Old World and the New is debatable. 
In my foreword to a revised edition of The Greek Myths, I suggest 
that a secret Dionysiac mushroom cult was borrowed from the native 
Pelasgians by the Achaeans of Argos . Dionysus 's Centaurs, Satyrs and 
Maenads, it seems, ritually ate a spotted toadstool called 'flycap' (amanita 
muscaria), which gave them enormous muscular strength, erotic power, 
delirious visions, and the gift of prophecy. Partakers in the Eleusinian, 
Orphic and other mysteries may also have known the panaeolus papi-
lionaceus, a small dung-mushroom still used by Portuguese witches, and 
similar in effect to mescalin. In lines 234—237, Gwion implies that a single 
gem can enlarge itself under the influence of 'the toad' or 'the serpent' 
into a whole treasury of jewels. His claim to be as learned as Math and to 
know myriads of secrets may also belong to the toad-serpent sequence; 
at any rate, psilocybe gives a sense of universal illumination, as I can attest 
from my own experience of it. 'The light whose name is Splendour' may 
refer to this brilliance of vision, rather than to the Sun. 
The Book of Taliesin contains several similar medleys or poems await-
ing resurrection: a most interesting task, but one that must wait until the 
texts are established and properly translated. T h e work that I have done 
here is not offered as in any sense final. 
C A D G O D D E U 
'The Batde of the Trees ' . 
The tops of the beech tree 
Have sprouted of late, 
A r e changed and renewed 
From their withered state. 
When the beech prospers, 
Though spells and litanies 
T h e oak tops entangle, 
There is hope for trees. 
45 
I have plundered the fern, 
Through all secrets I spy, 
Old Math ap Mathonwy 
Knew no more than I. 
For with nine sorts of faculty 
God has gifted me: 
I am fruit of fruits gathered 
From nine sorts of tree— 
Plum, quince, whortle, mulberry, 
Raspberry, pear, 
Black cherry and white 
With the sorb in me share. 
From my seat at Fefynedd, 
A city that is strong, 
/watched the trees and green things 
Hastening along. 
Retreating from happiness 
They would fain be set 
Informs ofthe chief letters 
Of the alphabet. 
Wayfarers wondered, 
Warriors were dismayed 
At renewal of conflicts 
Such as Gwydion made; 
Under the tongue root 
A fight most dread, 
And another raging 
Behind, in the head. 
The alders in the front line 
Began the affray. 
Willow and rowan-tree 
Were tardy in array. 
The holly, dark green, 
Made a resolute stand; 
He is armed with many spear points 
Wounding the hand. 
46 
With foot-beat of the swift oak 
Heaven and earth rung; 
'Stout Guardian of the Door', 
His name in every tongue. 
Great was the gorse in battle, 
And the ivy at his prime; 
The ha^el was arbiter 
At this charmed time. 
Uncouth and savage was the fir, 
Cruel the ash tree— 
Turns not aside a foot-breadth, 
Straight at the heart runs he. 
The birch, though very noble, 
Armed himself but late: 
A sign not of cowardice 
But of high estate. 
The heath gave consolation 
To the toil-spent folk, 
The long-enduring poplars 
In battle much broke. 
Some of them were cast away 
On the field of fight 
Because of holes torn in them 
By the enemy's might. 
Vtry wrathful was the vine 
Whose henchmen are the elms; 
I exalt him mightily 
To rulers of realms. 
Strong chieftains were the blackthorn 
With his ill fruit, 
The unbeloved whitethorn 
Who wears the same suit, 
The swift-pursuing reed, 
The broom with his brood, 
And thefurje but ill-behaved 
Until he is subdued. 
47 
The dower-scattering yew 
Stood glum at the fight's fringe, 
With the elder slow to burn 
Amidfires that singe, 
And the blessed wild apple 
Laughing in pride 
From the Gorchan of Maeldrew, 
By the rock side. 
In shelter linger 
Privet and woodbine, 
Inexperienced in warfare, 
And the courtly pine. 
But I, although slighted 
Because I was not big, 
Fought, trees, inyour array 
On the field of Goddeu Brig. 
48 
Chapter Three 
D O G , R O E B U C K AND L A P W I N G 
The fullest account of the original Battle of the Trees, though the Lapwing is not mentioned in it, is published in the Myvyrian Archaiology. This is a perfect example of mythographic short-
hand and records what seems to have been the most important religious 
event in pre-Christian Britain: 
'These are the Englyns [epigrammatic verses] that were sung at the 
Cad Goddeu, or, as others call it, the Battle of Achren, which was on 
account of a white roebuck, and a whelp; and they came from Annwm 
[the Underworld], and Amathaon ap Don brought them. And therefore 
Amathaon ap Don , and Arawn, King of Annwm, fought. A n d there 
was a man in that battle, who unless his name were known could not be 
overcome and there was on the other side a woman called Achren 
[ 'Trees'], and unless her name were known her party could not be 
overcome. And Gwydion ap Don guessed the name of the man, and 
sang the two Englyns following: 
'Sure-hoofed is my steed impelled by the spur; 
The high sprigs of alder are on thy shield; 
Bran art thou called, of the glittering branches. 
Sure-hoofed is my steed in the day of battle: 
The high sprigs of alder are in thy hand: 
Bran thou art, by the branch thou bearest— 
Amathaon the Good has prevailed' 
T h e story of the guessing of Bran's name is a familiar one to anthro-
pologists. In ancient times, once a god's secret name had been discovered, 
the enemies of his people could do destructive magic against them with it. 
The Romans made a regular practice of discovering the secret names of 
enemy gods and summoning them to Rome with seductive promises, a 
process technically known as elicio. Josephus in his Contra Apionem quotes 
an account of a magic ceremony of this sort carried out at Jerusalem in 
the second century B.C. at the instance of King Alexander Jannaeus the 
Maccabee; the god summoned was the Edomite Ass-god of Dora , near 
49 
Hebron. L i v y (v. 21 ) gives the formula used to summon the Juno of 
Veii to Rome, and Diodorus Siculus (xvii, 41 ) writes that the Tyrians 
used to chain up their statues as a precaution. Naturally the Romans, like 
the Jews , hid the secret name of their own guardian-deity with extra-
ordinary care; nevertheless one Quintus Valerius Soranus, a Sabine, was 
put to death in late Republican times for divulging it irresponsibly. T h e 
tribes of Amathaon and Gwydion in the Cdd Goddeu encounter were as 
intent on keeping the secret of Achren—presumably the trees, or letters, 
that spelt out the secret name of their own deity—as on discovering that 
of their opponents. The subject of this myth, then, is a batde for religious 
mastery between the armies of Don, the people who appear in Irish legend 
as the Tuatha d6 Danaan, 'the folk of the God whose mother is Danu ' , 
and the armies of Arawn ('Eloquence'), the King of Annwfn, or 
Annwm, which was the British Underworld or national necropolis. In 
the Romance of Pwyll, Prince of Dyved Arawn appears as a huntsman 
on a large pale horse, pursuing a stag with the help of a pack of white 
dogs with red ears—the Hounds of Hell familiar in Irish, Welsh, Highland 
and British folklore. 
T h e Tuatha de Danaan were a confederacy of tribes in which the king-
ship went by matrilinearsuccession, some of whom invaded Ireland from 
Britain in the middle Bronze A g e . The Goddess Danu was eventually 
masculinized into Don , or Donnus, and regarded as the eponymous 
ancestor of the confederacy. But in the primitive Romance of Math the Son 
of Mathonwy she appears as sister to King Math of Gwynedd, and 
Gwydion and Amathaon are reckoned as her sons—that is to say, as 
tribal gods of the Danaan confederacy. According to an archaeologically 
plausible Irish tradition in the Book of Invasions, the Tuatha de Danaan 
had been driven northward from Greece as a result of an invasion from 
Syria and eventually reached Ireland by way of Denmark, to which they 
gave their own name ( 'The Kingdom of the Danaans'), and North Britain. 
The date of their arrival in Britain is recorded as 1472 B.C.—for what that 
is worth. The Syrian invasion of Greece which set them moving north is 
perhaps the one hinted at by Herodotus in the first paragraph of his 
History: the capture by 'Phoenicians' of the Danaan shrine of the White 
Goddess Io at Argos , then the religious capital of the Peloponnese; the 
Cretans had colonized it about the year 1750 B.C. Herodotus does not 
date the event except by making it happen before the Argo expedition to 
Colchis, which the Greeks dated 1225 B.C. and before 'Europa' went 
from Phoenicia to Crete, a tribal emigration which probably took place 
some centuries earlier, prior to the sack of Cnossos in 1400 B.C. In the Book 
of Invasions there is a record, confirmed in Bede's Ecclesiastical History, 
of another invasion of Ireland, which took place two hundred years after 
the arrival of the Tuatha de Danaan. These people, sailing westwards 
5 ° 
from Thrace through the Mediterranean and out into the Atlantic, landed 
in Wexford Bay where they came in conflict with the Danaans; but were 
persuaded to pass on into Northern Britain, then called Albany. They 
were known as the Picts, or tattooed men, and had the same odd social 
habits—exogamy, totemism, public coition, cannibalism, tattooing, the 
participation of women in battle—that obtained in Thessaly before the 
coming of the Achaeans, and in Classical times among the primitive 
tribes of the Southern Black Sea coast, the Gulf of Sirte in Libya , Majorca 
(populated by Bronze A g e Libyans) and North-West Galicia. Their 
descendants still kept their non-Celtic language in Bede's day. 
Amathaon, or Amaethon, is said to take his name from the Welsh word 
amaeth, a ploughman, but it may be the other way about: that ploughmen 
were under the patronage of the god Amathaon. Perhaps the tribe was 
originally mothered by Amathaounta, a well-known Aegean Sea-goddess; 
another tribe of the same name, whose ancestral hero was Hercules, 
migrated from Crete to Amathus in Cyprus towards the end of the second 
millennium B.C.. Amathaon is credited with having taught Gwydion the 
wizardry for which he was afterwards famous; and this suggests that 
Gwydion was a late-comer to Britain, perhaps a god of the Belgic tribes 
that invaded Britain about 400 B.C., and was given honorary sonship of 
Danu some centuries after the first Danaan invasion. Amathaon was 
maternal nephew to Math Hen ( 'Old Math'), alias Math the son of 
Mathonwy. 'Math' means 'treasure'; but since Math is also credited with 
having taught Gwydion his magic, 'Math son of Mathonwy' may be a 
truncated version of 'Amathus son of Amathaounta'. Part of the tribe 
seems to have emigrated to Syria where it founded the city of Amathus 
(Hamath) on the Orontes, and another part to Palestine where it founded 
Amathus in the angle between the Jordan and the Jabbok. In the Table of 
Nations in Genesis X the Amathites are reckoned late among the Sons of 
Canaan, along with Hivites, Gergasites and other non-Semitic tribes. 
According to // Chronicles, XVII, 30, some of the Amathites were planted 
as a colony in Samaria, where they continued to worship their Goddess 
under the name of Ashima. 
Bran's name was guessed by Gwydion from the sprigs of alder in his 
hand, because though 'Bran' and Gwern, the word for 'alder' used in the 
poem, do not sound similar, Gwydion knew that Bran, which meant 
'C row ' or 'Raven ' , also meant 'alder'—the Irish is fearn, with the ' { ' 
pronounced as V — a n d that the alder was a sacred tree. The third of the 
four sons of King Partholan the Milesian, a legendary ruler of Ireland in 
the Bronze A g e , had been called Fearn; there had also been young Gwern, 
King of Ireland, the son of Bran's sister, Branwen ('White C r o w ' ) . 
Various confirmations of Gwydion ' s guess appear in the Romance of 
Branwen, as will be shown later. But the name spelt out by die trees, 
5* 
for the letters, ranged on the side of Amathaon and G w y d i o n remained 
unguessed. 
T h e Bran cult seems also to have been imported from the Aegean. 
There are remarkable resemblances between him and the Pelasgian hero 
Aesculapius who, like the chieftain Coronus ( 'crow') killed by Hercules, 
was a king of the Thessalian crow-totem tribe of Lapiths. Aesculapius was 
a C r o w on both sides of the family: his mother was Coronis ( 'crow') , 
probably a tide of the Goddess Athene to whom the crow was sacred. 
Tatian, the Church Father, in his Address to the Greeks, suggests a mother 
and son relationship between Athene and Aesculapius: 
After the decapitation of the Gorgon . . . Athene and Aesculapius 
divided the blood between them, and while he saved lives by means of 
them, she by the same blood became a murderess and instigator of wars. 
Aesculapius's father was Apollo whose famous shrine of Tempe stood 
in Lapith territory and to whom the crow was also sacred; and Apol lo is 
described as the father of another Coronus, King of Sicyon in Sicily. 
The legend of Aesculapius is that after a life devoted to healing, he raised 
Glaucus, son of Sisyphus the Corinthian, from the dead, and was burned 
to cinders by Zeus in a fit of jealousy; he had been rescued as a child from a 
bonfire in which his mother and her paramour Ischys ('Strength') per-
ished. Bran was likewise destroyed by his jealous enemy Evnissyen, a 
comrade of Matholwch King of Ireland to whom he had given a magical 
cauldron for raising dead soldiers to life; but in the Welsh legend it is Bran's 
nephew and namesake, the boy Gwern , who after being crowned King is 
immediately thrown into a bonfire and burned to death; Bran himself is 
wounded in the heel by a poisoned dart—like Achilles the Minyan, the 
Centaur Cheiron's pupil, and Cheiron himself—then beheaded; his head 
continues to sing and prophesy. (In Irish legend Aesculapius figures as 
Midach, killed after the Second Batde of Moytura by his father Diancecht, 
the Apol lo of Healing, who was jealous of his cures.) Aesculapius and 
Bran were both demi-gods with numerous shrines, and both were patrons 
of healing and resurrection. Another point of resemblance between them 
is their love-adventures: Aesculapius lay with fifty amorous girls in a 
night, and Bran had a similar jaunt in the Isle of Women, one of three 
times fifty that he visited on a famous voyage. Aesculapius is represented 
in Greek art with a dog beside him and a staff in his hand around which 
twine oracular snakes. 
T h e theft of the D o g and the Roebuck from the Underworld by 
Amathaon supports the Irish v iew that the Children of Danu came from 
Greece in the middle of the second millennium B.C., since there are several 
analogous Greek legends of Bronze A g e origin. F o r example, that of 
Hercules, the oak-hero, who was ordered by his task-master K ing 
5 2 
Eurystheus of Mycenae to steal the dog Cerberus from the King of the 
Underworld, and the brass-shod white roebuck from the Grove of the 
Goddess Artemis at Ceryneia in Arcadia. In another of his adventures 
Hercules snatched from Herophile—the priestess of Delphi whose father 
(according to Clementof Alexandria) was Zeus disguised as a lapwing, 
and whose mother was Lamia, the Serpent-goddess—the oracular tripod 
on which she was sitting, but was forced to restore it. Among the favour-
ite subjects of Greek and Etruscan art are Hercules carrying off the D o g 
and his struggles with the guardian of the Lamian oracle at Delphi for the 
possession of the roebuck and of the tripod. To call this guardian Apol lo 
is misleading because Apollo was not at that time a Sun-god, but an 
Underworld oracular hero. The sense of these myths seems to be that an 
attempt to substitute the cult of the oracular oak for that of the oracular 
laurel at Delphi failed, but that the shrines at Ceryneia in Arcadia and 
Cape Taenarum in Laconia, where most mythographers place the 
entrance to the Underworld visited by Hercules, were captured. Other 
mythographers say that the entrance was at Mariandynian Acherusia 
(now Heracli in Anatolia) and that where the saliva of Cerberus fell on 
the ground, up sprang the witch-flower aconite—which is a poison, 
a paralysant and a febrifuge; but this account refers to another historical 
event, the capture of a famous Bithynian shrine by the Henetians. 
But why D o g ? W h y Roebuck? W h y Lapwing? 
The D o g with which Aesculapius is pictured, like the dog Anubis, the 
companion of Egyptian Thoth, and the dog which always attended 
Melkarth the Phoenician Hercules, is a symbol of the Underworld; also 
of the dog-priests, called Enariae, who attended the Great Goddess of 
the Eastern Mediterranean and indulged in sodomitic frenzies in the D o g 
days at the rising of the Dog-star, Sirius. But the poetic meaning of the 
D o g in the Cad Goddeu legend, as in all similar legends, is 'Guard the 
Secret', the prime secret on which the sovereignty of a sacred king 
depended. Evidently Amathaon had seduced some priest of Bran— 
whether it was a homosexual priesthood I do not pretend to know—and 
won from him a secret which enabled Gwydion to guess Bran's name 
correctly. Hercules overcame the D o g Cerberus by a narcotic cake which 
relaxed its vigilance; what means Amathaon used is not recorded. 
The Lapwing, as Cornelius Agrippa, the early sixteenth-century occult 
philosopher, reminds us in his Vanity and Uncertainty of the Arts and 
Sciences (translated by James Sanford in 1569): 'seemeth to have some 
royal thing and weareth a crown. ' I do not know whether Agrippa 
seriously meant to include the lapwing among royal birds, but if he did his 
best authority was Leviticus XI, 19. The lapwing is there mentioned as an 
unclean, that is to say tabooed, bird in the distinguished company of the 
eagle, the griffon-vulture, the ibis, the cuckoo, the swan, the kite, the 
raven, owl and litde owl , the solan-goose (here not gannet but barnacle 
goose 1 ) , the stork, the heron and the pious pelican. That these taboos 
were of non-Semitic origin is proved by their geographical distribution: 
several of the birds do not belong to the heat-belt which is the Semitic 
homeland, and every one of them was sacred in Greece or Italy, or both, 
to a major deity. Biblical scholars have been puzzled by the 'uncleanness' 
of the lapwing—and doubt whether the bird is a lapwing and not a 
hoopoe or a hedgehog—but whenever uncleanness means sanctity the 
clue must be looked for in natural history. The Greeks called the lapwing 
polyplagktos, 'luring on deceitfully', and had a proverbial phrase 'more 
beseechful than a lapwing' which they used for artful beggars. In Wales 
as a boy I learned to respect the lapwing for the wonderful way in which 
she camouflages and conceals her eggs in an open field from any casual 
passer-by. At first I was fooled every time by her agonized peewit, peewit, 
screamed from the contrary direction to the one in which her eggs lay, 
and sometimes when she realized that I was a nest-robber, she would flap 
about along the ground, pretending to have a broken wing and inviting 
capture. But as soon as I had found one nest I could find many. The lap-
wing's poetic meaning is 'Disguise the Secret' and it is her extraordinary 
discretion which gives her the claim to sanctity. According to the Koran 
she was the repository of King Solomon's secrets and the most intelligent 
of the flock of prophetic birds that attended him. 
As for the White Roebuck, how many kings in how many fairy tales 
have not chased this beast through enchanted forests and been cheated 
of their quarry? The Roebuck's poetic meaning is 'Hide the Secret'. 
So it seems that in the Cad Goddeu story elements of a Hercules myth, 
which in Greek legend describes how the Achaeans of Mycenae captured 
the most important tribal shrines in the Peloponnese from some other 
Greek tribe, probably the Danaans, are used to describe a similar capture 
in Britain many centuries later. A n y attempt to date this event involves a 
brief summary of British pre-history. The generally accepted scheme of 
approximate dates derived from archaeological evidence is as follows: 
6000-3000 B.C. 
Old Stone A g e hunters, not numerous, maintained a few setdements in 
scattered places. 
3000-2500 B.C. 
Occasional and gradual immigration of N e w Stone A g e hunters who 
brought polished stone axes with them and the art of making rough pots. 
1 As barnacles turn Soland-geese, 
V th' Islands of the Orcades. 
(Butler's Hudibras) 
54 
2500—2000 B.C. 
Regular traffic across the English Channel and invasion by N e w Stone 
A g e long-headed agriculturists, who domesticated animals, practised 
flint-mining on a large scale and made crude ornamented pottery which 
has affinities with the ware found in burials in the Baltic islands of Born-
holm and Aland. T h e y came from Libya , by w a y of Spain, Southern and 
Northern France, or by way of Spain, Portugal and Brittany; some of 
them went on from France to the Baltic, and then crossed over into 
Eastern England after trade contact with the Black Sea area. They intro-
duced megalithic burials of the long-barrow style found in the Paris 
area, with inhumation but with little funeral furniture except the leaf-
shaped arrow-head, the manufacture of which goes back to the Old 
Stone A g e ; the leaves copied are apparently the crack-willow, or purple 
osier, and the elder. Sometimes a leaf-shaped 'port-hole* is knocked 
out between two contiguous slabs of the burial chamber, the leaf copied 
being apparendy the elder. 
2000— iSoo B.C. 
Invasion by a bronze-weaponed, broad-headed, beaker-making, 
avenue-building people from Spain by w a y of Southern France and the 
Rhine. Further immigration of long-heads from the Baltic, and from 
South-Eastern Europe by w a y of the Rhine. Cremation and the less 
ostentatious though better furnished round barrows were introduced. 
The leaf-shaped arrow-heads persisted, as they did in burials in France 
until early Imperial times; but the characteristic type was barbed and 
tanged in the shape of a fir-tree. 
i5oo-6oo B.C. 
Uninterrupted development of Bronze A g e culture. Cross-channel 
traffic without large-scale invasion, though settlements of iron-weaponed 
visitors dating from about 800 B.C. are found in the South. Invasion of 
North Britain by the Picts. Small segmented blue faience beads manufac-
tured in E g y p t between 1380 and 1350 B.C. were imported into Wiltshire 
in large quantities. The language spoken in Britain except by the Picts 
and Old Stone A g e Aboriginals is thought to have been 'proto-Celtic' . 
600 B.C. 
Invasion by a Goidelic people, identified by their 'frill-comb-smear' 
pottery, who migrated from the Baltic coast of Germany, entered the 
Rhineland where they adopted the 'Hallstadt' Iron A g e culture, then 
invaded Britain; but were forced to remain in the South-Eastern counties. 
400 B.C. 
First Belgic invasion of Bri tain—'La Tene ' Iron A g e culture; and of 
55 
Ireland between 350 and 300 B.C. Thesepeople were a mixture of Teutons 
and Brythons ( 'P-Celts ' ) and overran the greater part of the country: 
they were the ancient British whom the Romans knew. The Druidic 
culture of Gaul was ' L a Tene ' . 
So B.C.-45A.D. 
Second Belgic invasion. The principal tribesmen were the Atrebates 
w h o came from Artois, their setdements being identified by their bead-
rimmed bowls. T h e y had their capital at Calleva Atrebatum (Silchester) 
in North Hampshire, and their area of conquest extended from Western 
Surrey to the Vale of Trowbr idge in Wiltshire, including Salisbury Plain. 
If the story of Cdd Goddeu concerns the capture of the national necro-
polis on Salisbury Plain from its former holders, this is most likely to have 
happened during either the first or the second Belgic invasion. Neither the 
coming of the round-barrow men, nor the Goidelic seizure of South-
Eastern Britain, nor the Claudian conquest, which was the last before the 
coming of the Saxons, corresponds with the story. But according to 
Geoffrey of Monmouth's mediaeval History of the Britons two brothers 
named Belinus and Brennius fought for the mastery of Britain in the 
fourth century B.C.; Brennius was beaten and forced north of the Humber. 
Brennius and Belinus are generally acknowledged to be the gods Bran and 
Beli; and Beli in the Welsh Triads is described as the father of Arianrhod 
(Silver Wheel ' ) , the sister of Gwydion and Amathaon. Amathaon evi-
dently entered the Batde of the Trees as champion of his father Beli, the 
Supreme G o d of Light. 
So the Cdd Goddeu can perhaps be explained as the expulsion of a long-
established Bronze A g e priesthood from the national necropolis by an 
alliance of agricultural tribesmen, long settled in Britain and worshippers 
of the Danaan god Bel, Beli, Belus or Belinus, with an invading Brythonic 
tribe. The Amathaonians communicated to their Brythonic al l ies—Pro-
fessor Sir John Rhys takes Gwydion for a mixed Teuton-Celt deity and 
equates him with Woden—a religious secret which enabled Amathaon to 
usurp the place of Bran, the God of Resurrection, a sort of Aesculapius, and 
Gwydion to usurp that of Arawn King of Annwm, a god of divination 
and prophecy, and both together to institute a new religious system in the 
place of the old. That it was Gwydion who usurped Arawn's place 
is suggested by the cognate myth in the Romance of Math the Son of 
Mathonwy where Gwydion stole the sacred swine from Pryderi , the 
King of the Pembrokeshire Annwm. Thus the high sprigs of Bran's alder 
were humbled, and the D o g , Roebuck and Lapwing stolen from Arawn 
were installed as guardians of the new religious secret. T h e Amathaonians' 
motive for betraying their kinsmen to the foreign invaders will be dis-
cussed in Chapter Eight-
s ' 
It appears that Bran's people did not retire, after their spiritual defeat, 
without offering armed resistance; for the tradition is that 71,000 men 
fell in battle after the secret was lost. 
What sort of a secret? Caesar records that the Gallic Celts claimed 
descent from 'Dis '—that is to say, from a god of the dead corresponding 
to Dis in the Latin pantheon—and also worshipped deities corresponding 
with Minerva, Apol lo , Mars, Juppiter and Mercury. Since he also records 
that the Gallic Druids came to Britain for instruction in religion, the 
principal seat of the Dis cult was evidently in Britain. The capture of this 
shrine by a continental tribe was an epoch-making event, for it is clear 
from Caesar's account that the Druidic 'D i s ' was a transcendent god who 
took precedence of Minerva, Apol lo , Mars, Mercury, (to whom we may 
add Venus and Saturn, the Latin Crow-god, cognate with Aesculapius) 
and- even of Juppiter. A n d Lucan, a contemporary of Nero's, in his 
poem Pharsalia expressly states that souls, according to the Druids, do 
not go down to the gloomy Underworld of the Latin Dis , but proceed 
elsewhere and that death 'is but the mid-point of a long life'. 
The British Dis , in fact, was no mere Pluto but a universal god corres-
ponding closely with the Jehovah of the Hebrew prophets. Similarly, it 
can be argued that since the prime religious ritual of the Druids 'in the 
service of God Himself , as Pliny records, was bound up with the mistle-
toe, 'which they call all-heal in their language' and 'which falls from 
Heaven upon the oak', the name of 'D i s ' could not have been Bran, there 
being no mythic or botanical connexion between the alder and the mistle-
toe. Thus it is likely that the guessing of Bran's name was merely a clue 
towards guessing that of the Supreme God: Gwydion did not become Dis , 
nor did Amathaon; but they together displaced Bran (Saturn) and Arawn 
(Mercury) in their service of Dis , and redefined his godhead as Beli. But 
if so, was Dis originally Donnus, in fact Danu? 
It happens that we know the Norse name of Gwydion ' s horse, if 
Gwydion was indeed Woden, or Odin. It was Askr Yggr-drasill, or 
Ygdrasill, 'the ash-tree that is the horse of Y g g r ' , Y g g r being one of 
Woden's titles. Ygdrasill was the enchanted ash, sacred to Woden, whose 
roots and branches in Scandinavian mythology extended through the 
Universe. If Bran had been clever enough at the Cad Goddeu he would 
have pronounced his englyn first, with: 
Sure-hoofed is my steed in the day of battle. 
The high sprigs of ash are in thy hand— 
Woden thou art, by the branch thou bearest. 
The Battle of the Trees thus ended in a victory of the Ash-god and his 
ally over the Alder-god and his ally. 
The pre-Celtic Annwm from which Gwydion is said to have stolen the 
sacred swine of King Pryderi, and over which Arawn reigned in the 
Romance of Pwyll Prince of Dyred, was in the Prescelly Mountains of 
Pembrokeshire. But it is likely that there were at least two Annwms, and 
that the 'Battle of the Trees ' took place at the Annwm in Wiltshire before 
Gwydion ' s people invaded South Wales. It would be fallacious to regard 
Stonehenge as Bran's shrine, because it is an unsuitable site for the wor -
ship of an Alder-god. The older, larger, grander Avebury ring thirty 
miles to the north at the junction of the Kennet and a tributary, is the 
more likely site; and is proved by the debris removed from the ditch 
about it to have been in continuous use from the early Bronze A g e to 
Roman times. All the available evidence points to Stonehenge as Beli's seat, 
not Bran's; it is laid out as a sun-temple in cultured Apollonian style 
which contrasts strangely with the archaic roughness of Avebury . 
Geoffrey records that Bran and Beli (who, he says, gave his name to 
Billingsgate) were later reconciled, and together fought battles on the 
Continent. It is possible that troops from Britain served in the successful 
expedition of the Gauls against Rome in 390 B.C. The Gaulish leader was 
Brennus—Celtic kings habitually took the name of their tribal gods— 
and Geoffrey's confused account of subsequent Continental wars under-
taken by Bran and Belin evidently refers to the Gaulish invasion of Thrace 
and Greece in 279 B.C. when Delphi was plundered, the chief com-
mander of the Gauls being another Brennus. At any rate, the alder 
remained a sacred tree in Britain for long after this Cdd Goddeu; a King of 
Kent as late as the fifth century A . D . was named Gwerngen, 'son of the 
Alder ' . The answer to one of the riddles in the 'Taliesin' poem-medley 
called Angar Cyvyndawd ('Hostile Confederacy'), ' W h y is the alder of 
purplish colour?', is doubtless: 'Because Bran wore royal purple.' 
The ultimate origin of the god Beli is uncertain, but if we identify the 
British Belin or Beli with Belus the father of Danaus (as Nennius does), 
then we can further identify him with Bel, the Babylonian Earth-god, one 
of a male trinity, who succeeded to the titles of a far more ancient Meso-
potamian deity, the mother of Danae as opposed to the fatherof Danaus. 
This was Belili, the Sumerian White Goddess, Ishtar's predecessor, who 
was a goddess of trees as well as a Moon-goddess, Love-goddess and 
Underworld-goddess. She was sister and lover to Du'uzu, or Tammuz, 
the Corn-god and Pomegranate-god. From her name derives the familiar 
Biblical expression 'Sons of Belial '—the Jews having characteristically 
altered the non-Semitic name Belili into the Semitic Beliy ya'al ('from 
which one comes not up again', i.e. the Underworld)—meaning 'Sons of 
Destruction'. The Slavonic word beli meaning 'white' and the Latin 
bellus meaning 'beautiful' are also ultimately connected with her name. 
Originally every tree was hers, and the Goidelic bile, 'sacred tree', the 
mediaeval Latin billa and billus, 'branch, trunk of tree', and the English 
billet are all recollections of her name. Above all, she was a Wil low-
goddess and goddess of wells and springs. 
The willow was of great importance in the worship of Jehovah at 
Jerusalem, and the Great D a y of the Feast of Tabernacles, a fire and water 
ceremony, was called the D a y of Wil lows. Though alder and willow are 
not differentiated in Hebrew—they are of the same family—Tanaitic 
tradition, dating from before the destruction of the Temple, prescribed 
that the red-twigged willow with lanceolate leaves, i.e. the purple osier, 
should be the sort used in the thyrsus of palm, quince and willow carried 
during the Feast; if none were obtainable, then the round-leaved willow, 
i.e. the sallow or 'palm', might be used, but the variety with toothed 
leaves, i.e. the alder, was forbidden—presumably because it was used in 
idolatrous rites in honour of Astarte and her son the Fire-god. Although 
the use of the thyrsus was obligatory, the Israelites having taken it over 
with the Canaanites' Tabernacle ceremonies and incorporated it in 
the Mosaic Law, the wil low (or osier) was mistrusted by the more 
intelligent Jews in later days. According to one Ha.ga.dah, the wil low in 
the thyrsus symbolized the 'inferior and ignorant of Israel who have 
neither righteousness nor knowledge, as the willow has neither taste nor 
smell': in fact, even, the indifferent would be provided for by Jehovah. 
By his triumphant supersession of Queen Belili, Bel became the 
Supreme Lord of the Universe, father of the Sun-god and the Moon-god, 
and claimed to be the Creator: a claim later advanced by the upstart Baby-
lonian god Marduk. Bel and Marduk were finally identified, and since 
Marduk had been a god of the Spring Sun and of thunder, Bel had 
similarly become a sort of Solar Zeus before his emigration to Europe 
from Phoenicia. 
It seems then that Beli was originally a Wil low-god, a divinatory son of 
Belili, but became the G o d of Light , and that in fourth-century B . C . Br i -
tain, at the Cad Goddeu, his power was invoked by his son Amathaon as a 
means of supplanting Bran of the alder, whose counterpart had perhaps 
been similarly supplanted in Palestine. At the same time Gwydion of 
the ash supplanted Arawn, another divinatory god whose tree is not 
known. The implications of these peculiar interchanges of divine 
function will be discussed in a later chapter. 
The author of the Romance of Taliesin evidently knew Amathaon as 
'Llew Llaw' , a Brythonic title of Hercules, since he says in the Cerdd am 
Viib Llyr ( 'Song Concerning the Sons of L l y r ' ) : 
/ was at the Cad Goddeu with Llew and Gwydion, 
He who trans formed timber, earth andplants. 
The case is complicated by occasional bardic references to Beli and the 
sea which at first sight suggest that he is a Sea-god: the waves are his 
http://Ha.ga.dah
horses, the brine is his liquor. But this probably honours him as the 
tutelary deity of Britain, his 'honey isle' as it is called in a Triad—no god 
can rule over an island unless he also commands the adjacent waters— 
with a hint also that as the Sun-god he 'drinks the waters of the West* 
every evening at sunset, and that white horses are traditionally sacred to 
the sun. 
T h e last form in which the famous conflict between Beli and Bran 
occurs is the story of the brothers Balin and Balan in Malory's Morte 
iyArthur, who killed each other by mistake. But, as Charles Squire 
points out in his Celtic Myth and Legend, Bran appears in various other 
disguises in the same jumbled romance. As King Brandegore (Bran of 
Gower) he brings five thousand men to oppose King Arthur; but as Sir 
Brandel or Brandiles (Bran of Gwales) he fights valiandy on Arthur's 
side. As King Ban of Benwyk ('the square enclosure', called 'Caer 
Pedryvan' in the poem Preiddeu Annwm which will be examined in 
Chapter Six) he is a foreign ally of Arthur's; as Leodegrance—in the 
Welsh, O g y r Vran—he is Arthur's father-in-law; and as Uther Ben ('the 
wonderful head'), which is a reference to the story of the singing head 
buried on T o w e r Hill, he is Arthur's father. The Norman-French 
trovires and Malory who collected and collated their Arthurian romances 
had no knowledge of, or interest in, the historical and religious meaning 
of the myths that they handled. T h e y felt themselves free to improve the 
narrative in accordance with their new gospel of chivalry fetched from 
Provence—breaking up the old mythic patterns and taking liberties of 
every sort that the Welsh minstrels had never dared to take. 
The modern licence claimed by novelists and short-story writers to use 
their imaginations as freely as they please prevents students of mythology 
from realizing that in North-Western Europe, where the post-Classical 
Greek novel was not in circulation, story-tellers did not invent their plots 
and characters but continually retold the same traditional tales, extempor-
izing only when their memory was at fault. Unless religious or social 
change forced a modification of the plot or a modernization of incident, 
the audience expected to hear the tales told in the accustomed way. 
Almost all were explanations of ritual or religious theory, overlaid with 
history: a body of instruction corresponding with the Hebrew Scriptures 
and having many elements in common with them. 
60 
Chapter Four 
THE WHITE GODDESS 
Since the close connexion here suggested between ancient British, Greek, and Hebrew religion will not be easily accepted, I wish to make it immediately clear that I am not a British Israelite or any-
thing of that sort. My reading of the case is that at different periods in the 
second millennium B.C. a confederacy of mercantile tribes, called in Egyp t 
'the People of the Sea' , were displaced from the Aegean area by invaders 
from the north-east and south-east; that some of these wandered north, 
along already established trade-routes, and eventually reached Britain and 
Ireland; and that others wandered west, also along established trade-
routes, some elements reaching Ireland by way of North Africa and Spain. 
Still others invaded Syria and Canaan, among them the Philistines, who 
captured the shrine of Hebron in southern Judaea from the Edomite clan 
of Caleb; but the Calebites ( 'Dog-men' ) , allies of the Israelite tribe of 
Judah, recovered it about two hundred years later and took over a great 
part of the Philistine religion at the same time. These borrowings were 
eventually harmonized in the Pentateuch with a body of Semitic, Indo-
European and Asianic myth which composed the religious traditions of 
the mixed Israelite confederacy. T h e connexion, then, between the early 
myths of the Hebrews, the Greeks and the Celts is that all three races 
were civilized by the same Aegean people whom they conquered and 
absroved. A n d this is not of merely antiquarian interest, for the popular 
appeal of modern Catholicism, is, despite the patriarchal Trinity and the 
all-male priesthood, based rather on the Aegean Mother-and-Son religious 
tradition, to which it has s lowly reverted, than on its Aramaean orIndo-
European 'warrior-god' elements. 
To write in greater historical detail about the Danaans. Danu, Danae, or 
Don, appears in Roman records as Donnus, divine father of Cottius, the 
sacred king of the Cottians, a Ligurian confederacy that gave its name to 
the Cottian Alps . Cottys, Cotys , or Cottius is a widely distributed name. 
Cotys appears as a dynastic tide in Thrace between the fourth century B . C . 
and the first century A . D . , and the Cattini and Attacoti of North Britain 
and many intervening Cart- and Cott- tribes between there and Thrace 
are held to be of Cottian stock. There was also a Cotys dynasty in 
61 
Paphlagonia on the southern shore of the Black Sea. All seem to take 
their name from the great Goddess Cotytto, or Cotys , who was wor-
shipped orgiastically in Thrace, Corinth and Sicily. Her nocturnal orgies, 
the Cotyttia, were according to Strabo celebrated in much the same way 
as those of Demeter, the Barley-goddess of primitive Greece, and of 
Cybele, the Lion-and-Bee goddess of Phrygia in whose honour young 
men castrated themselves; in Sicily a feature of the Cotyttia was the carry-
ing of boughs hung with fruit and barley-cakes. In Classical legend Cottys 
was the hundred-handed brother of the hundred-handed monsters 
Briareus and Gyes , allies of the God Zeus in his war against the Titans on 
the borders of Thrace and Thessaly. These monsters were called 
Hecatontocheiroi ('the hundred-handed ones'). 
The story of this war against the Titans is intelligible only in the light 
of early Greek history. The first Greeks to invade Greece were the 
Achaeans who broke into Thessaly about 1900 B.C.; they were patriarchal 
herdsmen and worshipped an Indo-European male trinity of gods, 
originally perhaps Mitra, Varuna and Indra whom the Mitanni of Asia 
Minor still remembered in 1400 B.C., subsequently called Zeus, Poseidon 
and Hades* Little by little they conquered the whole of Greece and tried 
to destroy the semi-matriarchal Bronze A g e civilization that they found 
there, but later compromised with it, accepted matrilinear succession and 
enrolled themselves as sons of the variously named Great Goddess. 
They became allies of the very mixed population of the mainland and 
islands, some of them long-headed, some broad-headed, whom they 
named 'Pelasgians', or seafarers. The Pelasgians claimed to be born from 
the teeth of the cosmic snake Ophion whom the Great Goddess in her 
character of Eurynome ('wide rule') had taken as her lover, thereby 
initiating the material Creation; but Ophion and Eurynome are Greek 
renderings of the original names. They may have called themselves 
Danaans after the same goddess in her character of Danae, who presided 
over agriculture. At any rate the Achaeans who had occupied Argolis now 
also took the name of Danaans, and also became seafarers; while those 
who remained north of the isthmus of Corinth were known as Ionians, 
children of the Cow-goddess Io . Of the Pelasgians driven out of Argolis 
some founded cities in Lesbos, Chios and Cnidos; others escaped to 
Thrace, the Troad and the North Aegean islands. A few clans remained 
in Attica, Magn sia and elsewhere. 
The most warlike of the remaining Pelasgians were the Centaurs of 
Magnesia, whose clan totems included the wryneck and mountain lion. 
T h e y also worshipped the horse, probably not the Asiatic horse brought 
from the Caspian at the beginning of the second millennium B.C., but 
an earlier, and inferior, European variety, a sort of Dartmoor pony. 
The Centaurs under their sacred king Cheiron welcomed Achaean aid 
62 
against their enemies the Lapiths, of Northern Thessaly. The word 
'Cheiron' is apparently connected with the Greek cheir, a hand, and 'Cen-
taurs' with centron, a goat. In my essay What Food the Centaurs Ate, I 
suggest that they intoxicated themselves by eating 'fly-cap' (amanita 
muscaria), the hundred-clawed toad, an example of which appears, carved 
on an Etruscan mirror, at the feet of their ancestor Ixion. Were the Heca-
tontocheiroi the Centaurs of mountainous Magnesia, whose friendship was 
strategically necessary to the Achaean pastoralists of Thessaly and 
Boeotia? The Centaurs' mother goddess was called, in Greek, Leucothea, 
'the White Goddess ' , but the Centaurs themselves called her Ino or 
Plastene, and her rock-cut image is still shown near the ancient pinnacle-
town of Tantalus; she had also become the 'mother' of Melicertes, or 
Hercules Melkarth, the god of earlier semi-Semitic invaders. 
The Greeks claimed to remember the date of Zeus's victory in alliance 
with the Hecatontocheiroi over the Titans of Thessaly: the well-informed 
Tatian quotes a calculation by the first-century A . D . historian Thallus, 1 
that it took place 322 years before the ten-year siege of T r o y . Since the 
fall of T r o y was then confidently dated at 1 1 8 3 B . C . , the answer is 1505 B . C . 
If this date is more or less accurate 2 the legend probably refers to an exten-
sion of Achaean power in Thessaly at the expense of Pelasgian tribes, who 
were driven off to the north. The story of the Gigantomachia, the fight of 
the Olympian gods with the giants, probably refers to a similar but much 
later occasion, when the Greeks found it necessary to subdue the warlike 
Magnesians in their fastnesses of Pelion and Ossa—apparently because of 
trouble caused by their exogamic practices which conflicted with the 
Olympian patriarchal theory and gave them an undeserved reputation 
as sexual maniacs; it also records Hercules's charm against the nightmare. 
The Achaeans became Cretanized between the seventeenth and fifteenth 
centuries in the Late Minoan A g e , which in Greece is called the Mycenaean, 
after Mycenae, the capital city of the Atreus dynasty. The Aeolian Greeks 
invaded Thessaly from the north and were further able to occupy 
Boeotia and the Western Peloponnese. They settled down amicably with 
the Achaean Danaans and became known as the Minyans. It is likely that 
both nations took part in the sack of Cnossos about the year 1400, which 
ended Cretan sea-power. The reduction of Crete, by now become largely 
Greek-speaking, resulted in a great expansion of Mycenaean power: 
1 Thallus gives the earliest historical record of the Crucifixion. 
' A . R. Burn in his Minoans, Philistines and Greeks suggests that all traditional dates 
before 500 B.C. should be reduced to five-sixths of their distance from that date, since the 
Greeks reckoned three generations to a century, when four would be nearer the mark. H o w -
ever, Walter Leaf approves of 1 1 8 3 B . C . as the date of the Fall of T r o y , because the curse of 
one thousand years that had fallen on the city of Ajax in punishment for his rape of the 
Trojan priestess Cassandra was lifted about 183 B . C . The date now favoured by most archaeo-
logists is 1 2 3 0 B . C 
conquests in Asia Minor, Phoenicia, Libya and the Aegean islands. About 
the year 1250 B.C. a distinction arose between the Achaean Danaans and 
other less civilized Achaeans from North-western Greece who invaded 
the Peloponnese, founded a new patriarchal dynasty, repudiated the 
sovereignty of the Great Goddess, and instituted the familiar Olympian 
pantheon, ruled over by Zeus, in which gods and goddesses were equally 
represented. Myths of Zeus's quarrels with his wife Hera (a name of the 
Great Goddess), with his brother Poseidon, and with Apol lo of Delphi, 
suggest that the religious revolution was at first strongly resisted by the 
Danaans and Pelasgians. But a united Greece captured T r o y , at the 
entrance to the Dardanelles, a city which had taken toll of their commerce 
with the Black Sea and the East. A generation after the fall of T r o y , 
another Indo-European horde pressed down into Asia Minor and Europe 
—among them the Dorians who invaded Greece, killing, sacking and 
burning—and a great tideof fugitives was let loose in all directions. 
Thus we may, without historical qualms, identify Danu of the Tuatha 
d€ Danaan, who were Bronze A g e Pelasgians expelled from Greece in the 
middle of the second millennium, with the pre-Achaean Goddess Danae 
of Argos . Her power extended to Thessaly, and she mothered the early 
Achaean dynasty called the House of Perseus (more correctly Pterseus, 
'the destroyer'); but by Homer's time Danae was masculinized into 
'Danaus, son of Belus', who was said to have brought his 'daughters' to 
Greece from Libya by w a y of Egypt , Syria and Rhodes. The names of 
the three daughters, Linda, Cameira and Ialysa, are evidendy tides of the 
Goddess, who also figures as 'Lamia, daughter of Belus, a Libyan Queen'. 
In the well-known legend of the massacre of the sons of Aegyptus on 
their wedding night the number of these daughters of Danaus, or Danaids, 
is enlarged from three to fifty, probably because that was the regular 
number of priestesses in the Arg ive and Elian colleges of the Mother-
goddess cult. The original Danaans may well have come up to the Aegean 
from Lake Tritonis in Libya (now a salt marsh), by the route given in the 
legend, though it is unlikely that they were so called until they reached 
Syria. That the Cottians, who came to Northern Greece from the Black 
Sea by w a y of Phrygia and Thrace, were also reckoned as Danaans, 
proves that they arrived there before the Aeolians, who were not so 
reckoned. A. B. Cook in his Zeus gives strong reasons for believing that 
the Graeco-Libyans and the Thraco-Phrygians were related, and that 
both tribal groups had relatives among the early Cretans. 
We may further identify Danu with the Mother-goddess of the Aegean 
'Danuna' , a people who about the year 1200 B.C., according to con-
temporary Egyptian inscriptions, invaded Northern Syria in company 
with the Sherdina and Zakkala of Lydia , the Shakalsha of Phrygia, the 
Pulesati of Lyc ia , the Akaiwasha of Pamphylia, and other Eastern 
64 
Mediterranean peoples. To the Egyptians these were all 'Peoples of the 
Sea'—the Akaiwasha are Achaeans—forced by the pressure of the new 
Indo-European horde to emigrate from the coastal parts of Asia Minor 
as well as from Greece and the Aegean islands. The Pulesati became the 
Philistines of Southern Phoenicia; they were mixed with Cherethites 
(Cretans), some of whom served in King David 's bodyguard at Jerusalem 
—possibly Greek-speaking Cretans, Sir Arthur Evans suggests. One 
emigrant people, the conquerors of the Hittites, known to the Assyrians 
as the Muski and to the Greeks as the Moschians, established themselves 
on the Upper Euphrates at Hierapolis. Lucian's account in his De Dea 
Syria of the antique rites still practised in the second century A . D . at their 
temple of the Great Goddess gives the clearest picture of Aegean Bronze 
A g e religion that has been preserved. Tribes or clans of the same con-
federacy drifted westward to Sicily, Italy, North Africa, Spain. The 
Zakkala became the Sicels of Sicily; the Sherdina gave their name to 
Sardinia; the Tursha are the Tursenians (or Tyrrhenians) of Etruria. 
Some Danaans seem to have travelled west, since Silius Italicus, a first-
century Latin poet, said to have been a Spaniard, records a tradition that 
the Balearic islands—a centre of megalithic culture and one of the chief 
sources of tin in the ancient world—were first made into a kingdom by 
the Danaans Tleptolemus and Lindus. Lindus is a masculization of the 
Danaan Linda. At least one part of the people remained in Asia Minor. 
Recently a Danaan city has been discovered in the foothills of the Taurus 
Mountains near Alexandretta and the inscriptions (not yet deciphered) 
are in Hittite hieroglyphs of the ninth century B.C. and in Aramaic script. 
The language is thought to be Canaanitish and the sculptures are a mixture 
of Assyrio-Hittite, Egyptian and Aegean styles; which bears out the 
Greek account of Danaus as a son of Agenor (Canaan) who came up 
north from Libya by way of Egyp t and Syria. 
The myth of the emasculation of Uranus by his son Cronos and the 
vengeance subsequently taken on Cronos by his son Zeus, who banished 
him to the Western Underworld under charge of the 'hundred-handed 
ones', is not an easy one to disentangle. In its original sense it records the 
annual supplanting of the old oak-king by his successor. Zeus was at one 
time the name of a herdsmen's oracular hero, connected with the oak-tree 
cult of Dodona in Epirus, which was presided over by the dove-
priestesses of Dione, a woodland Great Goddess, otherwise known as 
Diana. The theory of Frazer's Golden Bough is familiar enough to make 
this point unnecessary to elaborate at length, though Frazer does not 
clearly explain that the cutting of the mistletoe from the oak by the Druids 
typified the emasculation of the old king by his successor—the misdetoe 
being a prime phallic emblem. The king himself was eucharistically eaten 
after castration, as several legends of the Pelopian dynasty testify; but 
65 
in the Peloponnese at least this oak-tree cult had been superimposed on a 
barley-cult of which Cronos was the hero, and in which human sacrifice 
was also the rule. In the barley-cult, as in the oak-cult, the successor to 
the kingship inherited the favours of the priestesses of his Goddess 
mother. In both cults the victim became an immortal, and his oracular 
remains were removed for burial to some sacred island—such as Samo-
thrace, Lemnos, Pharos near Alexandria, Ortygia the islet near Delos, the 
other Ortygia 1 off Sic i ly , Leuce off the mouth of the Danube, where 
Achilles had a shrine, Circe's Aeaea (now Lussin in the Adriatic), the 
Atlantic Elysium where Menelaus went after death, and the distant 
Ogygia , perhaps Torrey Island off the west coast of Ireland—under the 
charge of magic-making and orgiastic priestesses. 
That Cronos the emasculator was deposed by his son Zeus is an econo-
mical statement: the Achaean herdsmen who on their arrival in Northern 
Greece had identified their Sky-god with the local oak-hero gained 
ascendancy over the Pelasgian agriculturalists. But there was a com-
promise between the two cults. Dione, or Diana, of the woodland 
was identified with Danae of the barley; and that an inconvenient golden 
sickle, not a bill-hook of flint or obsidian, was later used by the Gallic 
Druids for lopping the mistletoe, proves that the oak-ritual had been 
combined with that of the barley-king whom the Goddess Danae, or 
Alphito, or Demeter, or Ceres, reaped with her moon-shaped sickle. 
Reaping meant castration; similarly, the Galla warriors of Abyssinia carry 
a miniature sickle into battle for castrating their enemies. The Latin 
Cronos was called Saturn and in his statues he was armed with a pruning-
knife crooked like a crow's bill: probably a rebus on his name. Fo r 
though the later Greeks liked to think that the name meant chronos, 
'time', because any very old man was humorously called 'Cronos ' , the 
more likely derivation is from the same root cron or corn that gives the 
Greek and Latin words for crow—corone and comix. The crow was a 
bird much consulted by augurs and symbolic, in Italy as in Greece, of 
long life. Thus it is possible that another name for Cronos, the sleeping 
Titan, guarded by the hundred-headed Briareus, was Bran, the Crow-
god. The Cronos myth, at any rate, is ambivalent: it records the super-
session and ritual murder, in both oak and barley cults, of the Sacred King 
at the close of his term of office; and it records the conquest by the 
Achaean herdsmen of the pre-Achaean husbandmen of Greece. At the 
Roman Saturnalia in Republican times, a festival corresponding with the 
1 There was a third Ortygia ('quail place"). According to Tacitus, the Ephesians in their plea 
before the Emperor Tiberius for the right of asylum in the Artemisianprecinct, stated that 
the cult of their Great Goddess Artemis (whom the Romans called Diana) was derived from 
Ortygia, where her name was then Leto. Dr. D. G. Hogarth places this Ortygia in the Arvalian 
Valley to the north of Mount Solmissos, but the suggestion is not plausible unless, like the 
islets of the same name, it was a resting place for quail in the Spring migration from A H c a . 
66 
old English Yu le , all social restraints were temporarily abandoned in 
memory of the golden reign of Cronos. 
I call Bran a Crow-god , but crow, raven, scald-crow and other large 
black carrion birds are not always differentiated in early times. Corone in 
Greek also included the corax, or raven; and the Latin corvus, raven, 
comes from the same root as comix, crow. The crows of Bran, Cronos, 
Saturn, Aesculapius and Apollo are, equally, ravens. 
The fifty Danaids appear in early British history. John Milton in his 
Early Britain scoffs ponderously at die legend preserved by Nennius that 
Britain derives its earliest name, Albion, by which it was known to Pliny, 
from Albina ('the White Goddess ') , the eldest of the Danaids. The name 
Albina, a form of which was also given to the River Elbe (Albis in Latin); 
and which accounts for the Germanic words elven, an elf-woman, alb, elf 
and alpdrucken, the nightmare or incubus, is connected with the Greek 
words alphos, meaning 'dull-white leprosy' 1 (Latin albus), alphiton, 'pearl-
barley', and Alphito, 'the White Goddess ' , who in Classical times had 
degenerated into a nursery bugbear but who seems originally to have 
been the Danaan Barley-goddess of Argos . Sir James Frazer regards 
her as 'either Demeter or her double, Persephone'. The word 'Argos ' 
itself means 'shimmering white', and is the conventional adjective to 
describe white priestly vestments. It also means 'quick as a flash'. That 
we are justified in connecting the hundred-armed men with the White 
Goddess of Argos is proved by the myth of l o , the same goddess, nurse 
to the infant Dionysus, who was guarded by Argus Panoptes ('all-eyes'), 
the hundred-eyed monster, probably represented as a white dog; A r g o 
was the name of Odysseus's famous dog. Io was the white cow aspect 
of the Goddess as Barley-goddess. She was also worshipped as a white 
mare, Leucippe, and as a white sow, Choere or Phorcis, whose more 
polite title was Marpessa, 'the snatcher'. 
N o w , in the Romance of Taliesin, Gwion 's enemy Caridwen, or Cerri-
Jwen, was a white Sow-goddess too, according to D r . MacCulloch who, 
in his well-documented Religion of the Ancient Celts, quotes Geoffrey of 
Monmouth and the French Celtologist Thomas in evidence and records 
that she was also described by Welsh bards as a Grain-goddess; he equates 
her with the Sow Demeter mentioned above. Her name is composed of 
the words cerdd and wen. Wen means 'white', and cerdd in Irish and Welsh 
1 The White Hill, or Tower Hill, at London preserves Albina's memory, the Keep built in 
1078 by Bishop Gundulf being still called the White Tower. Herman Melville in his Moby 
Dick devotes an eloquent chapter to a consideration of the contradictory emotions aroused 
hy the word 'white'—the grace, splendour and purity of milk-white steeds, white sacrificial 
bulls, snowy bridal veils and white priestly vestments, as opposed to the nameless horror 
aroused by albinos, lepers, visitants in white hoods and so forth—and records that the blood 
of American visitors to Tower Hill is far more readily chilled by 'This is the White Tower' , 
•ban by 'This is the Bloody Tower. ' Moby Dick was an albino whale. 
<57 
means 'gain' and also 'the inspired arts, especially poetry', like the Greek 
words cerdos and cerdeia, from which derives the Latin cerdo, a craftsman. 
In Greek, the weasel, a favourite disguise of Thessalian witches, was called 
cedro, usually translated 'the artful one'; and cerdo, an ancient word of 
uncertain origin, is the Spanish for 'p ig ' 1 . Pausanias makes Cerdo the 
wife of the Arg ive cult-hero Phoroneus, the inventor of fire and brother 
of both Io and Argus Panoptes, who will be identified in Chapter Ten 
with Bran. The famous cerdaha harvest-dance of the Spanish Pyrenees was 
perhaps first performed in honour of this Goddess, who has given her 
name to the best corn-land in the region, the valley of Cerdafla, dominated 
by the town of Puigcerda, or Cerdo's Hill. The syllable Cerd figures in 
Iberian royal names, the best known of which is L i v y ' s Cerdubelus, the 
aged chieftain who intervened in a dispute between the Romans and the 
Iberian city of Castulo. Cerridwen is clearly the White Sow, the Barley-
goddess, the White Lady of Death and Inspiration; is, in fact, Albina, or 
Alphito, the Barley-goddess who gave her name to Britain. Little 
Gwion had every reason to fear her; it was a great mistake on his part 
to try to conceal himself in a heap of grain on her own threshing floor. 
The Latins worshipped the White Goddess as Cardea, and Ovid tells 
a muddled story about her in his Fasti, connecting her with the word 
cardo, a hinge. He says that she was the mistress of Janus, the two-
headed god of doors and of the first month of the year, and had charge 
over door-hinges. She also protected infants against witches disguised as 
formidable night-birds who snatched children from their cradles and 
sucked their blood. He says that she exercised this power first at Alba 
('the white city ') , which was colonized by emigrants from the Peloponnese 
at the time of the great dispersal, and from which Rome was colonized, 
and that her principal prophylactic instrument was the hawthorn. 
Ovid 's story is inside out: Cardea was Alphito, the White Goddess who 
destroyed children after disguising herself in bird or beast form, and the 
hawthorn which was sacred to her might not be introduced into a house 
lest she destroyed the children inside. It was Janus, 'the stout guardian of 
the oak door', who kept out Cardea and her witches, for Janus was really 
the oak-god Dianus who was incarnate in the King of Rome and after-
wards in the Flamen Dialis, his spiritual successor; and his wife Jana was 
Diana (Dione) the goddess of the woods and of the moon. Janus and 
Jana were in fact a rustic form of Juppiter and Juno. The reduplicated p 
in Juppiter represents an elided n: he was Jun-pater—father Dianus. But 
before Janus, or Dianus, or Juppiter, married Jana or Diana or Juno , and 
put her under subjection, he was her son, and she was the White Goddess 
1 Cerdo is said to be derived from Setula, 'a little sow', but the violent metathesis of con-
sonants that has to be assumed to make this derivation good cannot be paralleled in the names 
of other domestic animals. 
68 
Cardea. And though he became the Door , the national guardian, she 
became the hinge which connected him with the door-post; the impor-
tance of this relationship will be explained in Chapter Ten. Car do, the hinge, 
is the same word as cerdo, craftsman—in Irish myth the god of craftsmen 
who specialized in hinges, locks and rivets was called Credne—the crafts-
man who originally claimed the goddess Cerdo or Cardea as his patroness. 
Thus as Janus's mistress, Cardea was given the task of keeping from the 
door the nursery bogey who in matriarchal times was her own august self 
and who was propitiated at Roman weddings with torches of hawthorn. 
Ovid says of Cardea, apparently quoting a religious formula: 'Her power 
is to open what is shut; to shut what is open.' 
Ovid identifies Cardea with the goddess Carnea who had a feast at 
Rome on June i, when pig's flesh and beans were offered to her. This is 
helpful in so far as it connects the White Goddess with pigs, though the 
Roman explanation that Carnea was so called quod carnem offerunt 
('because they offer her flesh') is nonsense. Moreover, as has already been 
noted in the Cdd Goddeu context, beanswere used in Classical times as a 
homoeopathic charm against witches and spectres: one put a bean in 
one's mouth and spat it at the visitant; and at the Roman feast of the 
Lemuria each householder threw black beans behind his back for the 
Lemures, or ghosts, saying: 'With these I redeem myself and my family.' 
The Pythagorean mystics, who derived their doctrine from Pelasgian 
sources, 1 were bound by a strong taboo against the eating of beans and 
quoted a verse attributed to Orpheus, to the effect that to eat beans was to 
eat one's parents' heads. 2 The flower of the bean is white, and it blooms at 
the same season as the hawthorn. The bean is the White Goddess ' s— 
hence its connexion with the Scottish witch cult; in primitive times only 
her priestesses might either plant or cook it. The men of Pheneus in 
Arcadia had a tradition that the Goddess Demeter, coming there in her 
wanderings, gave them permission to plant all grains and pulses except 
only beans. It seems, then, that the reason for the Orphic taboo was that 
the bean grows spirally up its prop, portending resurrection, and that 
ghosts contrived to be reborn as humans by entering into beans—Pliny 
mentions this—and being eaten by women; thus, for a man to eat a bean 
might be an impious frustration of his dead parents' designs. Beans were 
1 Pythagoras is said to have been a Tyrrhenian Pelasgian from Samos in the Northern 
Aegean. This would account for the close connection of his philosophy with the Orphic and 
Druidic. He is credited with having refrained not only from beans but from fish, and seems to 
have developed an inherited Pelasgian cult by travel among other nations. His theory of the 
transmigration of souls is Indian rather than Pelasgian. At Crotona he was accepted, like his 
successor Empedocles, as a reincarnation of Apollo. 
* The Platonists excused their abstention from beans on the rationalistic ground that they 
caused flatulence; but this came to much the same thing. Life was breath, and to break wind 
after eating beans was a proof that one had eaten a living soul—in Greek and Latin the same 
words, anima andpneuma, stand equally for gust of wind, breath and soul or spirit. 
6 9 
tossed to ghosts by Roman householders at the Lemuria to give them a 
chance of rebirth; and offered to the Goddess Carnea at her festival be-
cause she held the keys of the Underworld. 
Carnea is generally identified with the Roman goddess Cranae, w h o was 
really Cranaea, 'the harsh or stony one', a Greek surname of the Goddess 
Artemis whose hostility to children had constandy to be appeased. 
Cranaea owned a hill-temple near Delphi in which the office of priest was 
always held by a boy, for a five-year term; and a cypress-grove, the 
Cranaeum, just outside Corinth, where Bellerophon had a hero-shrine. 
Cranae means 'rock' and is etymologically connected with the Gaelic 'cairn' 
—which has come to mean a pile of stones erected on a mountain-top. 
I write of her as the White Goddess because white is her principal 
colour, the colour of the first member of her moon-trinity, but when 
Suidas the Byzantine records that Io was a cow that changed her colour 
from white to rose and then to black he means that the N e w Moon is the 
white goddess of birth and growth; the Full Moon, the red goddess of 
love and battle; the Old Moon, the black goddess of death and divination. 
Suidas's myth is supported by Hyginus's fable of a heifer-calf born to 
Minos and Pasiphae which changed its colours thrice daily in the same 
way. In response to a challenge from an oracle one Polyidus son of 
Coeranus correctly compared it to a mulberry—a fruit sacred to the 
Triple Goddess. The three standing stones thrown down from Moeltre 
Hill near Dwygyfy lch i in Wales in the iconoclastic seventeenth century 
may well have represented the Io trinity. One was white, one red, one 
dark blue, and they were known as the three women. The local monkish 
legend was that three women dressed in those colours were petrified as a 
punishment for winnowing corn on a Sunday. 
The most comprehensive and inspired account of the Goddess in all 
ancient literature is contained in Apuleius's Golden Ass, where Lucius in-
vokes her from the depth of misery and spiritual degradation and she 
appears in answer to his plea; incidentally it suggests that the Goddess 
was once worshipped at Moeltre in her triple capacity of white raiser, red 
reaper and dark winnower of grain. The translation is by William Adling-
ton (1566): 
About the first watch of the night when as I had slept my first sleep, I 
awaked with sudden fear and saw the moon shining bright as when she 
is at the full and seeming as though she leaped out of the sea. Then I 
thought with myself that this was the most secret time, when that god-
dess had most puissance and force, considering that all human things be 
governed by her providence; and that not only all beasts private and 
tame, wild and savage, be made strong by the governance of her light 
and godhead, but also things inanimate and without life; and I conr 
sidered that all bodies in the heavens, the earth, and the seas be by her 
increasing motions increased, and by her diminishing motions dimin-
ished: then as weary of all my cruel fortune and calamity, I found good 
hope and sovereign remedy, though it were very late, to be delivered 
from my misery, by invocation and prayer to the excellent beauty of 
this powerful goddess. Wherefore, shaking off my drowsy sleep I arose 
with a joyful face, and moved by a great affection to purify myself, I 
plunged my head seven times into the water of the sea; which number 
seven is convenable and agreeable to holy and divine things, as the 
worthy and sage philosopher Pythagoras hath declared. Then very 
lively and joyfully, though with a weeping countenance, I made this 
oration to the puissant goddess. 
'O blessed Queen of Heaven, whether thou be the Dame Ceres 
which art the original and motherly source of all fruitful things on the 
earth, who after the finding of thy daughter Proserpine, through the 
great j o y which thou didst presently conceive, didst utterly take away 
and abolish the food of them of old time, the acorn, and madest the 
barren and unfruitful ground of Eleusis to be ploughed and sown, and 
now givest men a more better and milder food; or whether thou be the 
celestial Venus, who, at the beginning of the world, didst couple to-
gether male and female with an engendered love, and didst so make an 
eternal propagation of human kind, being now worshipped within the 
temples of the Isle Paphos; or whether thou be the sister of the God 
Phoebus, who hast saved so many people by lightening and lessening 
with thy medicines the pangs of travail and art now adored at the sacred 
places of Ephesus; or whether thou be called terrible Proserpine by 
reason of the deadly howlings which thou yieldest, that hast power 
with triple face to stop and put away the invasion of hags and ghosts 
which appear unto men, and to keep them down in the closures of the 
Earth, which dost wander in sundry groves and art worshipped in 
divers manners; thou, which dost illuminate all the cities of the earth by 
thy feminine light; thou, which nourishest all the seeds of the world by 
thy damp heat, giving thy changing light according to the wanderings, 
near or far, of the sun: by whatsoever name or fashion or shape it is 
lawful to call upon thee, I pray thee to end my great travail and misery 
and raise up my fallen hopes, and deliver me from the wretched fortune 
which so long time pursued me. Grant peace and rest, if it please thee, 
to my adversities, for I have endured enough labour and p e r i l . . . . ' 
When I had ended this oration, discovering my plaints to the god-
dess, I fortuned to fall again asleep upon that same bed; and by and by 
(for mine eyes were but newly closed) appeared to mefrom the midst of 
the sea a divine and venerable face, worshipped even of the gods them-
selves. Then, little by little, I seemed to see the whole figure of her body, 
bright and mounting out of the sea and standing before me: wherefore 
7i 
I purpose to describe her divine semblance, if the poverty of my human 
speech will suffer me, or the divine power give me a power of eloquence 
rich enough to express it. First, she had a great abundance of hair, flow-
ing and curling, dispersed and scattered about her divine neck; on the 
crown of her head she bare many garlands interlaced with flowers, and 
in the middle of her forehead was a plain circlet in fashion of a mirror, 
or rather resembling the moon by the light it gave forth; and this was 
borne up on either side by serpents that seemed to rise from the furrows 
of the earth, and above it were blades of corn set out. Her vestment was 
of finest linen yielding diverse colours, somewhere white and shining, 
somewhere yellow like the crocus flower, somewhere rosy red, some-
where flaming; and (which troubled my sight and spirit sore) her cloak 
was utterly dark and obscure covered with shining black, and being 
wrapped round her from under her left arm to her right shoulder in 
manner of a shield, part of it fell down, pleated in most subtle fashion, 
to the skirts of her garment so that the welts appeared comely. Here and 
there upon the edge thereof and throughout its surface the stars 
glimpsed,, and in the middle of them was placed the moon in mid-
month, which shone like a flame of fire; and round about the whole 
length of the border of that goodly robe was a crown or garland wreath-
ing unbroken, made with all flowers and all fruits. Things quite diverse 
did she bear: for in her right hand she had a timbrel of brass [sistrum], a 
flat piece of metal carved in manner of a girdle, wherein passed not 
many rods through the periphery of it; and when with her arm she 
moved these triple chords, they gave forth a shrill and clear sound. In 
her left hand she bare a cup of gold like unto a boat, upon the handle 
whereof, in the upper part which is best seen, an asp lifted up his head 
with a wide-swelling throat. Her odoriferous feet were covered with 
shoes interlaced and wrought with victorious palm. Thus the divine 
shape, breathing out the pleasant spice of fertile Arabia, disdained not 
with her holy voice to utter these words to me: 
'Behold, Lucius, I am come; thy weeping and prayer hath moved me 
to succour thee. I am she that is the natural mother of all things, mistress 
and governess of all the elements, the initial progeny of worlds, chief of 
the powers divine, queen of all that are in Hell, the principal of them 
that dwell in Heaven, manifested alone and under one form of all the 
gods and goddesses [deorum dearum-que facies uniformis]. At my will the 
planets of the sky, the wholesome winds of the seas, and the lamentable 
silences of hell be disposed; my name, my divinity is adored through-
out the world, in divers manners, in variable customs, and by many 
names. F o r the Phrygians that are the first of all men call me The 
Mother of the Gods at Pessinus; the Athenians, which are spring from 
their own soil, Cecropian Minerva; the Cyprians, which are girt about 
7* 
by the sea, Paphian Venus; the Cretans which bear arrows, Dictynnian 
Diana; the Sicilians, which speak three tongues, Infernal Proserpine; 
the Eleusinians, their ancient goddess Ceres; some Juno, other Bellona, 
other Hecate, other Rhamnusia, and principally both sort of the Ethi-
opians which dwell in the Orient and are enlightened by the morning 
rays of the sun, and the Egyptians, which are excellent in all kind of 
ancient doctrine and by their proper ceremonies accustom to worship 
me, do call me by my true name, Queen Isis. Behold, I am come to take 
pity of thy fortune and turbuladon; behold I am present to favour and 
aid thee; leave off thy weeping and lamentation, put away all diy sor-
row, for behold the healthful day which is ordained by my providence.' 
Much the same prayer is found in Latin in a twelfth-century English 
herbal (Brit. Mus. MS. Harley, 1 5 8 5 , ^ I 2 v - i 3 r ) : 
Earth, divine goddess, Mother Nature, who dost generate all things 
and bringest forth ever anew the sun which thou hast given to the 
nations; Guardian of sky and sea and of all Gods and powers; through 
thy influence all nature is hushed and sinks to s l e e p . . . . Again, when it 
pleases thee, thou sendest forth the glad daylight and nurturest life 
with thine eternal surety; and when the spirit of man passes, to thee it 
returns. Thou indeed art righdy named Great Mother of the Gods; 
Victory is in thy divine name. Thou art the source of the strength of 
peoples and gods; without thee nothing can either be born or made 
perfect; thou art mighty, Queen of the Gods. Goddess, I adore thee as 
divine, I invoke thy name; vouchsafe to grant that which I ask of thee, 
so shall I return thanks to thy godhead, with the faith that is thy due 
N o w also I make intercession to you, all ye powers and herbs, and 
to your majesty: I beseech you, whom Earth the universal parent hath 
borne and given as a medicine of health to all peoples and hath put 
majesty upon, be now of the most benefit to humankind. This I pray 
and beseech you: be present here with your virtues, for she who 
created you hath herself undertaken that I may call you with the good 
will of him on whom the art of medicine was bestowed; therefore 
grant for health's sake good medicine by grace of these powers afore-
said. . . . 
How the god of medicine was named in twelfth-century pagan England 
is difficult to determine; but he clearly stood in the same relation to the 
Goddess invoked in the prayers as Aesculapius originally stood to Athene, 
Thoth to Isis, Esmun to Ishtar, Diancecht to Brigit, Odin to Freya, and 
Bran to Danu. 
Chapter Five 
GWION'S RIDDLE 
When with this complicated mythological argument slowly forming in my mind, I turned again to the Hanes Taliesin ( 'The Tale of Taliesin'), the riddling poem with which 
Taliesin first addresses King Maelgwyn in the Romance, I already sus-
pected that Gwion was using the D o g , the Lapwing and the Roebuck to 
help him conceal in his riddle the new Gwydionian secret of the Trees , 
which he had somehow contrived to learn, and which had invested him 
with poetic power. Reading the poem with care, I soon realized that 
here again, as in the Cad Goddeu, Gwion was no irresponsible rhapsodist, 
but a true poet; and that whereas Heinin and his fellow-bards, as stated in 
the Romance, knew only 'Latin, French, Welsh and Engl ish ' , he was well 
read also in the Irish classics—and in Greek and Hebrew literature too, as 
he himself claims: 
Tracthator fyngofeg 
Yn Efrai,yn Efroeg, 
Yn Efroeg, yn EfraL 
I realized too, that he was hiding an ancient religious mystery—a blas-
phemous one from the Church's point of view—under the cloak of 
buffoonery, but had not made this secret altogether impossible for a well-
educated fellow-poet to guess. 
I here use the name 'Gwion ' for 'Taliesin', to make it quite clear that I 
am not confusing the miraculous child Taliesin of the Romance of 
Taliesin with the historic Taliesin of the late sixth century, a group of 
whose authentic poems is contained in the Red Book of Hergest, and who 
is noticed by Nennius, in a quotation from a seventh-century genealogy 
of the Saxon Kings, as 'renowned in British poetry'. The first Taliesin 
spent much of his time during the last third of the sixth century as <a 
guest of various chiefs and princes to whom he wrote complimentary 
poems (Urien ap Cyavarch , Owein ap Urien Gwallag ap Laenaug, Cynan 
Garwyn ap Brochfael Ysgythrog , King of P o w y s , and the High King 
Rhun ap Maelgwn until he was killed by the Cod ing in a drunken 
quarrel). He went with Rhun in the firstcampaign against the men of the 
74 
North, the occasion of which was the killing of Elidir (Heliodorus) 
Mwynfawr, and the avenging raid of Clydno Eiddin, Rhydderch Hael 
(or Hen) and others, to which Rhun retaliated with a full-scale invasion. 
This Taliesin calls the English 'Eingl ' or 'Deifyr ' (Deirans) as often as 
he calls them 'Saxons' , and the Welsh 'Brython' not ' C y m r y ' . 
'Gwion ' wrote about six centuries later, at the close of the Period of the 
Princes. 
In his Lectures on Early Welsh Poetry, Dr . Ifor Williams, the greatest 
living authority on the text of the Taliesin poems, postulates from internal 
literary evidence that parts of the Romance existed in a ninth-century 
original. I do not dispute this, or his conclusion that the author was 
a paganistic cleric with Irish connexions; but must dispute his denial 
that there is 'any mysticism, semi-mysticism, or demi-semi-mysticism, 
in the poems and that the whole rigmarole can be easily explained as 
follows: 
Taliesin is just showing off; like the Kangaroo in Kipling's story— 
he had to! That was the role he had to play. 
As a scholar, D r . Williams naturally feels more at home with the 
earlier Taliesin, who was a straight-forward court bard of the skaldic sort. 
But the point of the Romance to me is not that a pseudo-Taliesin humor-
ously boasted himself omniscient, but that someone who styled himself 
Litde Gwion, son of Gwreang of Llanfair in Caereinion, a person of no 
importance, accidentally lighted on certain ancient mysteries and, be-
coming an adept, began to despise the professional bards of his time 
because they did not understand the rudiments of their traditional poetic 
lore. Proclaiming himself a master-poet, Gwion took the name of 
Taliesin, as an ambitious Hellenistic Greek poet might have taken the 
name of Homer. 'Gwion son of Gwreang ' is itself probably a pseudonym, 
not the baptismal name of the author of the Romance. Gwion is the equi-
valent (gw for f) of Fionn, or Finn, the Irish hero of a similar tale. Fionn 
son of Mairne, a Chief Druid 's daughter, was instructed by a Druid of 
the same name as himself to cook for him a salmon fished from a deep pool 
of the River Boyne, and forbidden to taste it; but as Fionn was turning 
the fish over in the pan he burned his thumb, which he put into his mouth 
and so received the gift of inspiration. For the salmon was a salmon of 
knowledge, that had fed on nuts fallen from the nine hazels of poetic art. 
The equivalent of Gwreang is Freann, an established variant of Fearn, the 
alder. Gwion is thus claiming oracular powers as a spiritual son of the 
Alder-god Bran. His adoption of a pseudonym was justified by tradition. 
The hero Cuchulain ('hound of Culain') was first named Setanta and was 
a reincarnation of the god Lugh; and Fionn ('fair') himself was first named 
Deimne. Bran was a most suitable father for Gwion , for by this time he 
75 
was known as the Giant O g y r Vran, Guinevere's father—his name, which 
means 'Bran the Malign' (ocur vran),1 has apparently given English the 
word 'ogre' through Perrault's Fairy Tales—and was credited by the 
bards with the invention of their art and with the ownership of the 
Cauldron of Cerridwen from which they said that the Triple Muse had 
been born. And Gwion 's mother was Cerridwen herself. 
It is a pity that one cannot be sure whether the ascription of the romance 
in an Iolo manuscript printed by the Welsh MSS. Society, to one 'Thomas 
ap Einion Offeiriad, a descendant of Gruffydd G w y r ' , is to be trusted. 
This manuscript, called 'Anthony Powel of Llwydarth's MS. ' , reads 
authentically enough—unlike the other notices of Taliesin printed by 
Lady Guest, on Iolo Morganwg's authority, in her notes to the Romance 
of Taliesin: 
Taliesin, Chief of the Bards, the son of Saint Henwg of Caerlleon 
upon Usk, was invited to the court of Urien Rheged, at Aberl lychwr. 
He, with Elffin, the son of Urien, being once fishing at sea in a skin 
coracle, an Irish pirate ship seized him and his coracle, and bore him 
away towards Ireland; but while the pirates were at the height of their 
drunken mirth, Taliesin pushed his coracle to the sea, and got into it 
himself, with a shield in his hand which he found in the ship, and with 
which he rowed the coracle until it verged the land; but, the waves 
breaking then in wild foam, he lost his hold on the shield, so that he had 
no alternative but to be driven at the mercy of the sea, in which state he 
continued for a short time, when the coracle stuck to the point of a 
pole in the weir of Gwyddno , Lord of Ceredigion, in Aberdyvi ; and in 
that position he was found, at the ebb, by Gwyddno ' s fishermen, by 
whom he was interrogated; and when it was ascertained that he was a 
bard, and the tutor of Elffin, the son of Urien Rheged, the son of 
Cynvarch: ' I , too, have a son named Elffin,' said Gwyddno , 'be thou a 
bard and teacher to him, also, and I will give thee lands in free tenure.' 
The terms were accepted, and for several successive years he spent his 
time between the courts of Urien Rheged and Gwyddno , called 
Gwyddno Garanhir, Lord of the Lowland Cantred; but after the 
territory of Gwyddno had become overwhelmed by the sea, Taliesin 
was invited by the Emperor Arthur to his court at Caerlleon upon Usk, 
where he became highly celebrated for poetic genius and useful, 
meritorious sciences. After Arthur's death he retired to the estate given 
to him by Gwyddno , taking Elffin, the son of that prince, under his 
protection. It was from this account that Thomas, the son of Einion 
Offeiriad, descended from Gruffyd G w y r , formed his romance of 
1 The syllable ocur, like the Old Spanish word for a man-eating demon, Huergo or Uergo, 
is probably cognate with Orcus, the Latin God of the Dead, originally a masculinization of 
Phorcis, the Greek Sow-Demeter. 
Taliesin, the son of CariadVen—Elffin, the son of Goddnou—Rhun, 
the son of Maelgwn Gwynedd , and the operations of the Cauldron of 
Ceridwen. 
If this is a genuine mediaeval document, not an eighteenth-century 
forgery, it refers to a muddled tradition about the sixth-century poet 
Taliesin and accounts for the finding of the Divine Child in the weir near 
Aberdovey rather than anywhere else. But probably 'Gwion ' was more 
than one person, for the poem Yr Awdyl Vraith, which is given in full in 
Chapter Nine, is ascribed in the Peniardd MS. to Jonas Athraw, the 
'Doctor ' of Menevia (St. David ' s ) , who lived in the thirteenth century. A 
complimentary reference to the See of St. David 's concealed in the Hones 
Taliesin supports this ascription. (Menevia is the Latin form of the 
original name of the place, Hen Meneu, 'the old bush'; which suggests the 
cult of a Hawthorn-goddess.) 
D r . Williams explains the confused state of the texts of the poems con-
tained in the Romance by suggesting that they are the surviving work of 
the Awenyddion of the twelfth century, described by Giraldus Cambrensis: 
There are certain persons in Cambria, whom you will find nowhere 
else, called Awenyddion, or people inspired; when consulted upon any 
doubtful event, they roar out violendy, are rendered beside themselves, 
and become, as it were, possessed by a spirit. T h e y do not deliver the 
answer to what is required in a connected manner; but the person who 
skilfully observes them will find, after many preambles, and many 
nugatory and incoherent though ornamented speeches, the desired 
explanation conveyed in some turn of word; they are then roused from 
their ecstasy, as from a deep sleep, and, as it were, by violence com-
pelled to return to their proper senses. After having answered the 
question they do not recover until violently shaken by other people; 
nor can they remember the replies they have given. If consulted a second 
or third time upon the same point, they will make use of expressionstotally different; perhaps they speak by means of fanatic and ignorant 
spirits. These gifts are usually conferred upon them in dreams; some 
seem to have sweet milk and honey poured on their lips; others fancy 
that a written schedule is applied to their mouths, and on awakening 
they publicly declare that they have received this g i f t . . . . They invoke, 
during their prophecies, the true and living God , and the Holy 
Trinity, and pray that they may not by their sins be prevented from 
finding the truth. These prophets are found only among those Britons 
who are descended from the Trojans. 
The Awenyddion, the popular minstrels, may indeed have disguised 
their secrets by a pretence of being possessed by spirits, as the Irish poets 
77 
are recorded to have done by buffoonery, and they may have induced 
these ecstasies by toadstool eating; but Cad Goddeu, Angar Cyvyndawd 
and all the other strange poems of the Book of Taliesin medley read like 
nonsense only because the texts have been deliberately confused, doubt-
less as a precaution against their being denounced as heretical by some 
Church officer. This explanation would also account for the presence of 
simple, dull religious pieces in the medley—plausible guarantees of 
orthodoxy. Unfortunately a large part of the original material seems to 
be lost, which makes a confident restoration of the remainder difficult. 
When an authoritative version of the text and an authoritative English 
translation has been published—none is so far available, else I should 
have used it—the problem will be simpler. But that the Awenyddion 
were descended from the Trojans is an important statement of Gerald's; 
he means that they inherited their traditions not from the C y m r y but 
from the earlier inhabitants of Wales whom the C y m r y dispossessed. 
T h e context of the thirteenth-century version of the Romance can be 
reconstructed from what G w y n n Jones has written of Phylip Brydydd of 
Llanbadarn F a w r and the poem in which he mentions his contention with 
the beirddyspyddeid, vulgar rhymesters, as to who should first present a 
song to Prince Rhys Ieuanc on Christmas D a y . 
'The evidence of this poem is extremely valuable, as it shows us con-
clusively that, by this time, at any rate, the lower order of bards had 
won for themselves the privilege of appearing at a Welsh court, and of 
being allowed to compete with the members of the closer corporation. 
It is exceedingly difficult to make out with certainty the meaning of the 
poem, but the bard seems to lament the relaxation or abandonment of 
the ancient custom of the court of the house of T e w d w r [afterwards 
the English House of Tudor ] , where formerly, after a battle, none were 
without recompense, and where frequently he had himself been pre-
sented with gifts. If praise were the pledge of bravery, then his desert 
should have been to receive liquor, rather than to become an 'ermid'. 
The bard also mentions a certain Bleiddriw, who would not have given 
him his due, and seems to imply that this person was guilty of versifying 
untruth, as well as to apply to him the epithet twyll i gwndid [sc. 
perverter of poetic practice]. The suggestion in this poem, therefore, is 
that the person referred to was the author of a broken or irregular song. 
We are further told by Phylip that the Chair of Maelgwn Hir was meant 
for bards, not for the irregular rhymesters, and that if that chair in his 
day were deserved, it should be contended for by the consent of saints 
and in accordance with truth and privilege. A Penkerdd [privileged 
bard] could not be made of a man without art. In a second poem, the 
poet's patron, probably also of the house of Tewdwr , is asked to pay 
78 
heed to the contention of the bards and the rhymesters, and the appear-
ance of Elffin in the contentions of Maelgwn is referred to. The bard 
says that, since then, mere chattering had caused long unpleasantness, 
and the speech of strangers, the vices of women and many a foolish tale 
had come to Gwynedd [North Wales], through the songs of false 
bards whose grammar was bad and who had no honour. Phylip 
solemnly states that it is not for man to destroy the privilege of the gift 
of God . He laments the fall of the office of the bards, and describes his 
own song as "the ancient song of Taliesin" which, he says—and this is 
significant—"was itself new for nine times seven years". " A n d " , he adds 
finally, "though I be placed in a foul grave in the earth, before the 
violent upheaval of judgement, the muse shall not cease from deserving 
recognition while the sun and moon remain in their circles; and unless 
untruth shall overcome truth, or the gift of God shall cease in the 
end, it is they who shall be disgraced in the contention: He will remove 
from the vulgar bards their vain delight." 
'It will be observed that these poems supply a very interesting 
account of the points of contention. We see that the song of Taliesin 
and the contentions of Maelgwn Hir are set up as standards; that those 
standards were believed to have been regulated in agreement with the 
will of saints and in accordance with truth and privilege; that the con-
tentions were not open to the lower order of bards; and that a man 
without art could not become a Penkerdd. It is alleged that the speech 
of strangers, the vices of women, and numerous foolish tales had come 
to Gwynedd—even to Gwynedd, where the contentions of Maelgwn 
had been held—by means of the songs of false bards whose grammar 
was faulty. We see that the song of the official or traditional bards is 
claimed to be the gift of God; that its essence was truth, compared with the 
untruth of the newer song; and that Phylip Brydydd was prepared, as it 
were, to die in the last ditch, fighting for the privilege of the true gift of 
poesy. We observe that, in spite of all this, the rhymesters were allowed 
to tender a song on Christmas D a y at the court of Rhys Ieuanc. 
'It will have been observed that the first poem of Phylip Brydydd 
mentions a Bleiddriw who refused to acknowledge him, and whose 
own song, as I interpret the extremely compressed syntax of the poem, 
Phylip describes as broken and irregular. It is not improbable that we 
have here a reference to the much discussed Bledri of Giraldus Cam-
brensis, "that famous dealer in fables, who lived a little before our time". 
The probability is that, in this Bledri, we have one of the men who re-
cited Welsh stories in French, and so assisted their passage into other 
languages. Gaston Paris, so long ago as 1879, identified him with the 
Breri, to whom Thomas, the author of the French poem of Tristan, 
acknowledges his debt, describing him as having known "les his wires et 
79 
les contes de tous les wis et comtes qui avaient vicu en Bretagne". Phylip 
Brydydd is said to have flourished between 1200 and 1250. As Rhys 
Ieuanc, his patron, died about 1220, probably Phylip was born before 
1200. Giraldus himself died in 1220. This brings them sufficiently near 
to allow of the possibility of their both referring to the same Bledri. 
At any rate, this is the only case known to me in Welsh of a contempor-
ary reference to a Bledri corresponding to the person mentioned by 
Giraldus. But I would base no argument upon this possible identity. 
If the Bleiddri of Phylip's poem be another Bleiddri, the fact still 
remains that he was regarded as being of the lower order of bards, and 
that Phylip, the traditional bard, charged his class, at any rate, with 
debasing the poetic diction of the bards and with making untruth the 
subject of poetry. 
'What then could be the meaning of untruth as the subject of song? 
Considering the word in the light of the Codes, and of the contents of 
the poems of the court-bards themselves, I submit that it simply means 
tales of imagination. The official bards were prohibited fromwriting 
imaginative narrative and material for representation; they were 
enjoined to celebrate the praise of God and of brave or good men. 
This they did, as we have seen, in epithetical verse of which the style is 
remarkably and intentionally archaic* 
Phylip's complaint that his opponent Bleiddri had no 'honour' means 
that he did not belong to the privileged class of Cymric freemen from 
which the court-bards were chosen. In the Romance 0f Taliesin we have 
the story from the side of the minstrel, but an extraordinarily gifted 
minstrel, who had studied abroad among men of greater learning than 
were to be found anywhere in Wales and who insisted that the court-
bards haH forgotten the meaning of the poetry that they practised. 
Throughout the poems the same scornful theme is pressed: 
Am I not a candidate for fame, to be heard in song?... 
Avaunt,you boastful bards.... 
This unprivileged minstrel boasts that the Chair is rightly his: he, not any 
poet of Phylip Brydydd 's merely academic attainment, is the true heir of 
Taliesin. However , for courtesy's sake, the tale of Gwion and Cerridwen 
is told in terms of sixth-century, not thirteenth-century, history. 'The 
speech of strangers' which, Phyl ip complains, has corrupted Gwynedd is 
likely to have been Irish: for Prince Gruffudd ap Kynan, a gifted and pro-
gressive prince educated in Ireland, had introduced Irish bards and 
minstrels into his principality in the early twelfth century. It may have 
been from this Irish literary colony, not from Ireland itself, that Gwion 
first derived his superior knowledge. Gruffudd also had Norsemen in his 
80 
entourage. His careful regulations for the government of bards and 
musicians were revived at the Caerwys Eisteddfod in 15 23. 
Here, finally, is the Hemes Taliesin riddle in Lady Charlotte Guest's 
translation. In it, Litde Gwion answers King Maelgwyn's questions as to 
who he was and whence he came: 
Primary chief bard am I to Elphin, 
And my original country is the region of the summer stars; 
Idno and Heinin called me Merddin, 
At length every king will call me Taliesin, 
5 / was with my Lord in the highest sphere, 
On the fall ofLucifer into the depth of hell 
I have borne a banner before Alexander; 
I know the names ofthe stars from north to south; 
I have been on the Galaxy at the throne of the Distributor; 
10 I was in Canaan when Absalom was slain; 
I conveyed Awen [the Divine Spirit] to the level of the 
vale of Hebron; 
I was in the court of Don before the birth of Gwydion. 
I was instructor to Eli and Enoch; 
I have been winged by the genius of the splendid crosier; 
IJ I have been loquacious prior to being gifted with speech; 
I was at the place of the crucifixion of the merciful son of God; 
I have been three periods in the prison of Arianrhod; 
I have been the chief director of the work of the tower of 
Nimrod. 
I am a wonder whose origin is not known. 
20 / have been in Asia with Noah in the Ark, 
I have witnessed the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah; 
I have been in India when Roma was built; 
I am now come here to the remnant ofTroia. 
I have been with my Lord in the manger of the ass; 
25 / strengthened Moses through the water of Jordan; 
I have been in the firmament with Mary Magdalene; 
I have obtained the muse from the Cauldron ofCaridwen; 
I have been bard of the harp to Lleon of Lochlin. 
I have been on the White Hill, in the court of Cynvelyn, 
30 For a day and a year in stocks andfetters, 
I have suffered hunger for the Son ofthe Virgin, 
I have been fostered in the land ofthe Deity, 
I have been teacher to all intelligences, 
I am able to instruct the whole universe. 
3 5 / shall be until the day ofdoom on the face ofthe earth; 
81 
And it is not known whether my body isflesh or fish. 
Then I was for nine months 
In the womb of the hag Caridwenj 
I was originally little Gwion, 
40 And at length I am Taliesin. 
T h e deceitful cry of the Lapwing! Gwion was not so ignorant of sacred 
history as he pretended: he must have known perfectly well that Moses 
never crossed the Jordan, that Mary Magdalene was never in the Firma-
ment, that Lucifer's fall had been recorded by the prophet Isaiah centuries 
before the time of Alexander the Great. Refusing to be lured away from 
the secret by his apparently nonsensical utterances, I began my unravelling 
of the puzzle by answering the following questions: 
Line 1 1 . W h o did convey the Divine Spirit to Hebron? 
„ 1 3 . W h o did instruct Enoch? 
„ 16. W h o did attend the Crucifixion? 
„ 25. W h o did pass through Jordan water when Moses was forbid-
den to do so? 
I felt confident that I would presently catch a gleam of white through the 
tangled thicket where the Roebuck was harboured. 
N o w , according to the Pentateuch, Moses died on Pisgah on the other 
side of Jordan and 'no man knoweth his sepulchre to this day'; and of all 
the Children of Israel who had come with him into the wilderness out of 
the house of bondage, only two, Caleb and Joshua, crossed into the 
Promised Land. As spies they had already been bold enough to cross and 
recross the river. It was Caleb who seized Hebron from the Anakim on 
behalf of the G o d of Israel and was granted it by Joshua as his inheritance. 
So I realized that the D o g had torn the whole poem into shreds with his 
teeth and that the witty Lapwing had mixed them up misleadingly, as she 
did with the torn shreds of the fruit passage in the Cdd Goddeu. The 
original statement was: 'I conveyed the Divine Spirit through the water 
of Jordan to the level of the vale of Hebron.' A n d the T must be Caleb. 
If the same trick had been played with every line of the Hanes Taliesin, 
I could advance a little further into the thicket. I could regard the poem 
as a sort of acrostic composed of twenty or thirty riddles, each of them 
requiring separate solution; what the combined answers spelt out prom-
ised to be a secret worth discovering. But first I had to sort out and re-
assemble the individual riddles. 
After the misleading 'through the water of Jordan' had been removed 
from line 25, 'I strengthened Moses' remained. Well, who ^ s t r e n g t h e n 
Moses? And where was this strengthening done? I remembered that 
Moses was strengthened at the close of his battle with the Amalekites, by 
having his hands held up by two companions. Where did this batde take 
82 
place and who were the strengthened? It took place at Jehovah-Nissi, 
close to the Mount of God , and the strengthened were Aaron and Hur. 
So I could recompose the riddle as: 'I strengthened Moses in the land of 
the Deity ' . A n d the answer was: 'Aaron and Hur' . If only one name was 
needed, it would probably be Hur because this is the only action recorded 
of him in the Pentateuch. 
Similarly, in line 25, 'I have been with Mary Magdalene' had to be 
separated from the misleading 'in the firmament' and the other part of the 
riddle looked for in another verse. I had already found it by studying the 
list of people present at the Crucifixion: St. Simon of Cyrene, St. John 
the Aposde, St. Veronica, Dysmas the good thief, Gestas the bad thief, the 
Centurion, the Virgin Mary, Mary Cleopas, Mary Magdalene. . . . But I 
had not overlooked the woman who (according to the Proto-evangelium 
of St. James) was the first person ever to adore the child Jesus, the prime 
witness of his parthenogenesis, and his most faithful follower. She is men-
tioned in Mark XV, as standing beside Mary Magdalene. So: 'I was with 
Mary Magdalene at the place of the Crucifixion of the merciful Son of God. ' 
The answer was: 'Salome'. 
W h o instructed Enoch? (Eli does not, apparently, belong to this 
riddle.) I agree with Charles, Burkitt, Oesterley, Box and other Biblical 
scholars that nobody can hope to understand the Sayings of Jesus who 
has not read the Book of Enoch, omitted from the canon of the Apocrypha 
butclosely studied by the primitive Christians. I happened to have been 
reading the book and knew that the answer was 'Uriel ' , and that Uriel 
instructed Enoch 'on the fall of Lucifer into the depth of hell'. A curious 
historical point is that the verse about Uriel 's instruction of Enoch is not 
included in the fragments of the Greek Book of Enoch quoted by the 
ninth-century Byzantine historian Syncellus, nor in the Vatican MS. 
(1809), nor in the quotations from the Book of Enoch in the Epistle of St. 
Jude. It occurs only in the text dug up at Akhmim in Egypt in 1886, and in 
the Ethiopian translation of an earlier Greek text, which is the only 
version which we know to have been extant in the thirteenth century. 
Where did Gwion find the story? Was a knowledge of Ethiopian among 
this atainments? Or did he find a complete Greek manuscript in the 
library of some Irish abbey that had escaped the fury of the Vikings ' war 
against books? The passage in the First Book of Enoch, XVIII, zi, and 
XIX, 1, 2,3, runs: 
And I saw a deep abyss and columns of heavenly fire, and among 
them I saw columns of fire falling, which were beyond measure alike 
upwards and downwards. . . . And Uriel said to me: 'Here shall stand 
the angels who have lain with women and whose spirits, assuming 
many different forms, defile mankind and lead them astray into 
83 
demonolatry and sacrificing to demons: here shall they stand until the 
D a y of Judgement. . . . A n d the women whom they seduced shall 
become Sirens.' I, Enoch, alone saw this vision of the end of all things; 
no other shall see as far as I. 
This discovery took me a stage further, to line 7: 'I have borne a 
banner before Alexander.' Among the poems attributed to Taliesin in the 
Red Book of Hergest is a fragment called Y Gofeisws Byd ( 'A Sketch of the 
World ' ) which contains a short panegyric of the historical Alexander, and 
another Anrhyfeddonau Alexander, 'The Not-wonders of Alexander '—a 
joke at the expense of a thirteenth-century Spanish romance ascribing to 
Alexander adventures properly belonging to the myth of Merlin—which 
tells mockingly how he went beneath the sea and met 'creatures of 
distinguished lineage among the fish ' But neither of these poems gave 
me a clue to the riddle. If it must be taken literally I should perhaps have 
guessed the answer to be 'Neoptolemus', who was one of Alexander's 
bodyguard and the first man to scale the walls of Gaza at the assault. But 
more probably the reference was to Alexander as a re-incarnation of Moses. 
According to Josephus, when Alexander came to Jerusalem at the out-
set of his Eastern conquests, he refrained from sacking the Temple but 
bowed down and adored the Tetragrammaton on the High Priest's 
golden frontlet. His astonished companion Parmenio asked why in the 
world he had behaved in this unkingly way. Alexander answered: 'I did 
not adore the High Priest himself but the God who has honoured him 
with office. The case is this: that I saw this very person in a dream, dressed 
exactly as now, while I was at Dios in Macedonia. In my dream I was 
debating with myself how I might conquer Asia , and this man exhorted 
me not to delay. I was to pass boldly with my army across the narrow sea, 
for his God would march before me and help me to defeat the Persians. 
So I am now convinced that Jehovah is with me and will lead my armies 
to victory. ' The High Priest then further encouraged Alexander by show-
ing him the prophecy in the Book of Daniel which promised him the 
dominion of the East; and he went up to the Temple, sacrificed to Jehovah 
and made a generous peace-treaty with the Jewish nation. The prophecy 
referred to Alexander as the 'two-horned King ' and he subsequently pic-
tured himself on his coins with two horns. He appears in the Koran as 
Dhul Karnain, 'the two-horned'. Moses was also ' two-horned', and in 
Arabian legend 'El Hidr, the ever-young prophet', a former Sun-hero of 
Sinai, befriended both Moses and Alexander 'at the meeting place of two 
seas'. To the learned Gwion, therefore, a banner borne before Alexander 
was equally a banner borne before Moses; and St. Jerome, or his Jewish 
mentors, had already made a poetic identification of Alexander's horns 
with those of Moses. 
84 
The banner of Moses was 'Nehushtan', the Brazen Serpent, which he 
raised up to avert the plague in the wilderness. When he did so he became 
an 'Alexander', i.e. a 'warder-off-of-evil-from-man'. So the answer of this 
riddle is 'Nehushtan' or, in the Greek Septuagint spelling, in which I 
imagine Gwion had read the story, 'Ne-Esthan'. It should be remem-
bered that this Brazen Serpent in the Gospel According to John, III, 14 
and the apocryphal Epistle of Barnabas, XII, y is a type of Jesus Christ. 
Barnabas emphasizes that the Serpent 'hung on a wooden thing', i.e. the 
Cross, and had the power of making alive. In Numbers, XXI, 9 it is de-
scribed as a 'seraph', a name given by Isaiah to the flying serpents that 
appeared in his vision as the attendants of the Living God and flew to him 
with a live coal from the altar. 
The next riddle I had to solve, a combination of lines 9 and 26, was: 'I 
have been in the firmament, on the Galaxy. ' The Galaxy, or Milky W a y , 
is said to have been formed when the milk of the Great Goddess Rhea of 
Crete spouted abundantly into the sky after the birth of the infant Zeus. 
But since the Great Goddess's name varies from mythographer to mytho-
grapher—Hyginus, for example, debates whether to call her Juno or 
Ops (Wealth)—Gwion has considerately given us another clue: 'When 
Roma was built'. He is correctly identifying a Cretan with a Roman god-
dess, and what is more surprising, recognizes Romulus as a Latin deity of 
the same religious system as Cretan Zeus. Romulus 's mother was also 
named Rhea, and if she had trouble with her milk when she was forced to 
wean her twins in order to conceal their birth, so had Cretan Rhea in the 
same circumstances. The main difference was that Romulus and Remus 
had a she-wolf for their foster-mother, whereas Zeus (and some say his 
foster-brother Goat Pan, too), was suckled by the she-goat Amalthea, 
whose hide he afterwards wore as a coat; or, as still others say, by a white 
sow. Both Romulus and Zeus were brought up by shepherds. So: 'I have 
been in the firmament, on the Galaxy, when Roma was built.' The 
answer is Rhea, though it was not Rhea herself but the spurt of her milk, 
rhea in Greek, that was on the Galaxy. Gwion had been anticipated by 
Nennius in giving more importance to Rhea, mother of Romulus, than the 
Classical mythologists had done: Nennius called her 'the most holy queen'. 
This riddle is purposely misleading. The only legend about the Galaxy 
that Heinin and the other bards at Maelgwyn's court would have known 
concerns Blodeuwedd, conjured by Gwydion to be the bride of Llew 
Llaw Gyffes. L lew 's other name was Huan and Blodeuwedd was trans-
formed into an owl and called T w y l l Huan ('the deceiving of Huan') for 
having caused Llew's death: the Welsh for owl being tylluan. The legend 
of Blodeuwedd and the Galaxy occurs in the Peniardd MSS.: 
The wife of Huan ap D o n was a party to the killing of her husband 
and said that he had gone to hunt away from home. His father Gwydion , 
the King of Gwynedd, traversed all countries in search of him, and at 
last made Caer Gwydion , that is the Milky W a y , as a track by which to 
seek his soul in the heavens; where he found it. In requital for the 
injury that she had done he turned the young wife into a bird, and she 
fled from her father-in-law and is called to this day T w y l l Huan. Thus 
the Britons formerly treated their stories and tales after the manner of 
the Greeks, in order to keep them in memory. 
It should be added that the form 'Caer Gwydion ' , instead of 'Caer 
Wydion ' , proves the myth to be a lateone. Blodeuwedd (as shown in 
Chapter T w o ) was Olwen, 'She of the White Track' , so Gwydion was 
right to search for her in the Galaxy: Rhea with her white track of stars 
was the celestial counterpart of Olwen-Blodeuwedd with her white track 
of trefoil. 
W h o , in line 21, witnessed the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah? 
L o t , or perhaps the unnamed 'wife of Lot ' . 
W h o , in line 18, was 'the chief director of the work of the tower of 
Nimrod'? I saw that the Lapwing was at her tricks again. The question 
really ran: ' O f the work on what tower was Nimrod the chief director?' 
The answer was 'Babel ' . Gower 's lines on the inconvenience caused to 
Nimrod and his masons when the confusion of tongues began, had run 
in my head for years: 
One called for stones, they brought him tyld [tiles] 
And Nimrod, that great Champioun, 
He raged like ayoung Lioun. 
Who, in line 24, was 'with my Lord in the manger of the Ass '? Was 
the answer 'swaddling clothes'? Then someone called my attention to the 
text of Luke II, 16: 'And they came with haste and found Mary and Joseph 
and the babe lying in a manger.' Gwion was being mischievous: literally, 
the sentence reads as though Joseph, Mary and the child were all together 
in the manger. The answer was evidently 'Joseph' , since that was St. 
Joseph's most glorious moment. 
W h o was it that said, in line 23: 'I am now come here to the remnant of 
Troia. ' According to Nennius, Sigebertus Gemblasensis, Geoffrey of 
Monmouth and others, Brutus the grandson of Aeneas landed with the 
remnants of the Trojans at Totnes in Devon in the year 1074 B .C .—109 
years after the accepted date of the Fal l of T r o y . A people who came over 
the Mor Tawch (the North Sea) some seven centuries later to join them 
were the Cymry . They cherished the notion that they were descended 
from Gomer, son of Japhet, and had wandered all the way from Tapro-
bane (Ceylon—see Triad 54) by way of Asia Minor before finally settling 
86 
at L l y d a w in North Britain. So : 1 have been in India and Asia (line 20) 
and am now come here to the remnant of Troia. ' The answer was 'Gomer ' . 
'I know the names of the stars from north to south' in line 8, sug-
gested one of the Three Happy Astronomers of Britain mentioned in 
the Triads, and I judged from the sentence 'my original country is the 
region of the summer stars' (i.e. the West) which seemed to belong to this 
riddle, that no Greek, Egyptian, Arabic , or Babylonian astronomer was 
intended. Idris being the first named of the three astronomers, the answer 
was probably 'Idris*. 
'I have been on the White Hill, in the Court of Cynvelyn (Cymbeline) ' 
in line 29, evidendy belonged with 'I was in the Court of D o n before the 
birth of Gwydion ' , in line 1 2 . The answer was 'Vron ' or 'Bran' , whose 
head, after his death, was according to the Romance of Branwen buried on 
the White Hill (Tower Hill) at London as a protection against invasion— 
as the head of King Eurystheus of Mycenae was buried in a pass that 
commanded the approach to Athens, and the alleged head of Adam was 
buried at the northern approach to Jerusalem—until King Arthur ex-
humed it. For Bran was a son of D o n (Danu) long before the coming of 
the Belgic Gwydion . 1 
The answer to 'I was in Canaan when Absalom was slain' (line 1 0 ) , 
was clearly 'David ' . King David had crossed over Jordan to the Canaanite 
refuge-city of Mahanaim, while Joab fought the Battle of the Wood of 
Ephraim. There in the gateway he heard the news of Absalom's death. 
In compliment to the See of St. David 's , Gwion has combined this state-
ment with 'I have been winged by the genius of the splendid crozier.' 
('And St. David! ' as we Royal Welch Fusiliers loyally add to all our 
toasts on March 1st.) One of the chief aims of Prince Llewelyn and the 
other Welsh patriots of Gwion 's day was to free their Church from 
English domination. Giraldus Cambrensis had spent the best part of his 
quarrelsome ecclesiastical life ( 1 1 4 5 - 1 2 1 3 ) in campaigns to make the See 
of St. David 's independent of Canterbury and to fill it with a Welsh 
Archbishop. But King Henry II and his two sons saw to it that only 
politically reliable Norman-French churchmen were appointed to the 
Welsh sees, and appeals by the Welsh to the Pope were disregarded 
because the power of the Angevin kings weighed more at the Vatican 
than the possible gratification of a poor, divided and distant principality. 
Who , in line 20, when the misleading 'in Asia ' has been removed, was 
'with Noah in the A r k ' ? I guessed 'Hu Gadarn', who according to the 
Triads led the C y m r y from the East. With his plough-oxen he also drew 
1 Bran's connexion with the White Hill may account for the curious persistence at the 
Tower of London of tame ravens, which are regarded by the garrison with superstitious 
reverence. There is even a legend that the security of the Crown depends on their continuance 
there: a variant of the legend about Bran's head. The raven, or crow, was Bran's oracular bird. 
up from the magic lake the monster avanc which caused it to overflow in a 
universal flood. He had been 'fostered between the knees of Dylan in the 
Deluge' . But the Lapwing, I found later, was deliberately confusing 
Dylan with Noah; Noah really belongs to the Enoch riddle in line 1 3 . 
The present riddle must run: 'I have been fostered in the Ark. ' But it 
could be enlarged with the statement in line 33: 'I have been teacher to all 
intelligences', for Hu Gadarn, 'Hu the Mighty' , who has been identified 
with the ancient Channel Island god Hou, was the Menes, or Palamedes, 
of the Cymry and taught them ploughing—'in the region where Con-
stantinople now stands'—music and song. 
Who , in line 27, 'obtained the Muse from the cauldron of Caridwen'? 
Gwion himself. However, the cauldron of Caridwen was no mere witch's 
cauldron. It would not be unreasonable to identify it with the cauldron 
depicted on Greek vases, the name written above Caridwen being 
'Medea', the Corinthian Goddess who killed her children, as the Goddess 
Thetis also did. In this cauldron she boiled up old Aeson and restored him 
to youth; it was the cauldron of rebirth and re-illumination. Yet when the 
other Medea, Jason's wife, played her famous trick (recorded by Diodorus 
Siculus) on "old Pelias of Iolcos, persuading his daughters to cut him up 
and stew him back to youth and then calmly denouncing them as parri-
cides, she disguised her Corinthian nationality and pretended to be a 
Hyperborean Goddess. Evidently Pelias had heard of the Hyperborean 
cauldron and had greater faith in it than in the Corinthian one. 
'It is not known whether my body is flesh or fish.' This riddle, in line 
36, was not hard to answer. I remembered the long-standing dispute in 
the mediaeval Church whether or not it was right to eat barnacle goose on 
Fridays and other fast-days. The barnacle goose does not nest in the 
British Isles. (I handled the first clutch of its eggs ever brought 
there; they were found at Spitzbergen in the Arctic.) It was universally 
believed to be hatched out of the goose barnacle—to quote the Oxford 
English Dictionary, 'a white sea-shell of the pedunculate genus of Cirri-
pedes.' The long feathery cirri protruding from the valves suggested 
plumage. Giraldus Cambrensis once saw more than a thousand embryo 
barnacle geese hanging from one piece of drift wood on the shore. 
Campion wrote in his Elizabethan History of Ireland: 'Barnacles, thou-
sands at once, are noted along the shoares to hang by the beakes about the 
edges of putrified timber . . . which in processe taking lively heate of the 
Sunne, become water-foules.' Barnacle geese were therefore held by some 
to be fish, not fowl, and legitimate Friday eating for monks. The word 
'barnacle', the same dictionary suggests, is formed from the Welsh brenig, 
or Irishbairneach, meaning a limpet or barnacle-shell. Moreover, the 
other name for the barnacle goose, the 'brent' or the 'brant', is apparently 
formed from the same word. Caius, the Elizabethan naturalist, called it 
8 8 
Anser Brendinus and wrote of it: ' "Bernded" seu "Brended" id animal 
dicitur.' This suggests a connexion between bren, bairn, brent, brant, bem 
and Bran who, as the original Cad Goddeu makes plain, was an Under-
world-god. Fo r the northward migration of wild geese is connected in 
British legend with the conducting to the icy Northern Hell of the souls 
of the damned, or of unbaptized infants. In Wales the sound of the geese 
passing unseen overhead at night is supposed to be made by the Cwm 
Annwm ('Hounds of Hell' with white bodies and red ears), in England by 
Yell Hounds, Yeth Hounds, Wish Hounds, Gabriel Hounds, or Gabriel 
Ratchets. The Hunter is called variously Gwyn ('the white one')—there 
was a G w y n cult in pre-Christian Glastonbury—Heme the Hunter, and 
Gabriel. In Scotland he is Arthur. 'Arthur' here may stand for Arddu 
('the dark one').. .Satan's name in the Welsh Bible. But his original name 
in Britain seems to have been Bran, which in Welsh is Vron. The fish-or-
flesh riddle must therefore belong with the other two Vron riddles already 
answered. 
The alternative text of the Hanes Taliesin published in the Myvyrian 
Archaiology is translated by D. W. Nash as follows: 
1 An impartial Chief Bard 
Am I to Elphin. 
My accustomed country 
Is the land of the Cherubim. 
2 Johannes the Diviner 
I was called by Merddin, 
At length every King 
Will call me Taliesin. 
3 / was nine months almost 
In the belly of the hag Caridwen; 
I was atfirst little Gwion, 
At length I am Taliesin. 
4 I was with my Lord 
In the highest sphere, 
When Lucifer fell 
Into the depths of Hell. 
5 I carried the banner 
Before Alexander. 
I know the names of the stars 
From the North to the South, 
6 / was in Caer Bedion 
Tetragrammaton; 
I conveyed Heon [the Divine Spirit] 
Down to the vale of Ebron. 
7 I was in Canaan 
When Absalom was slain; 
I was in the Hall of Don 
Before Gwydion was born. 
8 I was on the horse's crupper 
Of Eli and Enoch; 
I was on the high cross 
Of the merciful Son of God. 
9 I was the chief overseer 
At the building of the tower of Nimm 
I have been three times resident 
In the castle of Arianrhod. 
10 I was in the Ark 
With Noah and Alpha; 
I saw the destruction 
Of Sodom and Gomorrah. 
11 I was in Africa [Asia?] 
Before the building of Rome; 
I am now come here 
To the remnants ofTroia. 
12 I was with my King 
In the manger of the ass; 
I supported Moses 
Through the waters of Jordan. 
13 I was in the Firmament 
With Mary Magdalene; 
I obtained my inspiration 
From the cauldron of Caridwen. 
14 I was Bard of the harp 
To Deon ofLlychlyn; 
I have suffered hunger 
With the son of the Virgin. 
15 I was in the White Hill 
In the Hall of Cynvelyn, 
In stocks and fetters 
Ayear and a half. 
16 I have been in the buttery 
In the land of the Trinity; 
9 ° 
It is not known what is the nature 
Of its meat and its fish. 
17 / have been instructed 
In the whole system of the universe; 
1 shall be till the day of judgement 
On the face ofthe earth. 
1 8 / have been in an uneasy chair 
Above Caer Sidin, 
And the whirling round without motion 
Between three elements. 
19 Is it not the wonder of the world 
That cannot be discovered? 
The sequence is different and the Lapwing has been as busy as ever. 
But I learned a good deal from the variants. In place of 'the land of the 
Summer Stars', 'the land of the Cherubim' is mentioned. Both mean the 
same thing. The Eighteenth Psalm (verse 10) makes it clear that the 
Cherubim are storm-cloud angels; and therefore, for Welshmen, they are 
resident in the West, from which quarter nine storms out of every ten 
blow. The Summer Stars are those which lie in the western part of the 
firmament. 
The first two lines in stanza 18, 'I have been in an uneasy chair above 
Caer Sidin' helped me. There is a stone seat at the top of Cader Idris, 'the 
Chair of Idris' where, according to the local legend, whoever spends the 
night is found in the morning either dead, mad, or a poet. The first part 
of this sentence evidently belongs to the Idris riddle, though Gwion, in 
his Kerddam Veib Llyr mentions a 'perfect chair' in Caer Sidi ( 'Revolving 
Castle'), the Elysian fortress where the Cauldron of Caridwen was 
housed. 
The text of stanza 2, 'Johannes the Diviner I was called by Merddin', 
seems to be purposely corrupt, since in the Mabinogion version the sense 
is: 'Idno and Heinin called me Merddin.' I thought at first that die original 
line ran: 'Johannes I was called, and Merddin the Diviner ' , and I was right 
so far as I went. Merddin, who in mediaeval romances is styled Merlin, 
was the most famous ancient prophet in British tradition. The manifest 
sense of the stanza is that Gwion had been called Merddin, 'dweller in the 
sea', by Heinin, Maelgwyn's chief bard, because like the original Merddin 
he was of mysterious birth and, though a child, had confounded the bardic 
college at D y g a n w y exactly as Merddin (according to Nennius and 
Geoffrey of Monmouth) had confounded Vortigern's sages; that he had 
9i 
also been called 'John the Baptist' ( 'But thou, child, shalt be called the 
prophet of the Most Highest'); but that eventually everyone would call 
him Taliesin ('radiant brow') the chief of poets. D r . MacCulloch suggests 
that there was an earlier Taliesin than the sixth-century bard, and that he 
was a Celtic Apollo; which would account for the 'radiant brow' and for 
his appearance among other faded gods and heroes at King Arthur's 
Court in the Romance of Kilhwch and Olwen. (Apollo himself had once 
been a dweller in the sea—the dolphin was sacred to him—and oddly 
enough John the Baptist seems to have been identified by early Christian 
syncretists in Egypt with the Chaldean god Oannes who according to 
Berossus used to appear at long intervals in the Persian Gulf, disguised as 
the merman Odacon, and renew his original revelation to the faithful. 
The case is further complicated by the myth of Huan, the Flower-goddess 
Blodeuwedd's victim, who was really the god L lew Llaw, another 'sea-
dweller'.) 
It took me a long time to realize that the concealed sense of stanza 2, 
which made the textual corruption necessary, was a heretical paraphrase 
of the passage in the three synoptic Gospels (Matt. XVI, 14, Mark VI, 
i5, Luke IX, j , 8): 
Some say thou art John the Baptist, and some Elias; and some, one 
of the ancient prophets risen from the dead. . . .' But Peter answered: 
'Thou art the Christ.' 
The completing phrase 'and Elias' occurs in stanza 8. The Divine Child 
is speaking as Jesus Christ, as I believe he also is in stanza 14: 'I have 
suffered hunger with the Son of the Virgin. ' Jesus was alone then except 
for the Devil and the 'wild beasts'. But the Devi l did not go hungry; and 
the 'wild beasts' in the Temptation context, according to the acutest 
scriptural critics—e.g. Professor A. A. Bevan and Dr . T. K. Cheyne— 
were also of the Devil 's party. The Mabinogion version, line 3 1 , is: 'I have 
suffered hunger for the Son of the Virgin, ' which comes to the same 
thing: Jesus suffered hunger on his own account. The answer to this 
riddle was simply 'Jesus ' , as 'Taliesin' was the answer to 'Joannes, and 
Merddin the Diviner, and Elias I was called'. 
'I was in the Ark with Noah and Alpha' , in stanza 10, and 'I was in 
Caer Bedion, Tetragrammaton', stanza 6, must together refer to the 
'Holy Unspeakable Name of God ' . 'Alpha and Omega' was a divine peri-
phrasis which it was permitted to utter publicly; and the 'tetragrammaton' 
was the cryptogrammic Hebrew way of spelling the secret Name in four 
letters as J H W H . I thought at first that 'I was in CaerBedion' belonged to 
the Lo t riddle: because 'Lot ' is the Norman-French name for Lludd, the 
king who built London, and Caer Bedion is Caer Badus, or Bath, which 
according to Geoffrey of Monmouth was built by Lludd's father Bladud. 
92 
But to Gwion the Welshman Lludd was not 'Lot ' , nor is there any record 
of Lludd's having lived at Bath. 
I let the 'Caer Bedion' riddle stand over for a while, and also the riddle 
'I was Alpha Tetragrammaton'—if this conjunction composed the riddle 
—the answer to which was evidently a four-lettered Divine Name 
beginning with A. Meanwhile, who was 'bard of the harp to Deon, or 
Lleon, of Lochlin, or Llychlyn ' (line 28; and stanza 14)? 'Deon King of 
Lochlin and Dublin ' , is an oddly composite character. Deon is a variant 
spelling of Don, who, as already pointed out, was really Danu the Goddess 
of the Tuatha de Danaan, the invaders of Ireland, patriarchized into a 
King of Lochlin, or Lochlann, and Dublin. Lochlann was the mythical 
undersea home of the later Fomorian invaders of Ireland, against whom 
the Tuatha de Danaan fought a bloody war. The god Tethra ruled it. It 
seems that legends of the war between these two nations were worked by 
later poets into ballad cycles celebrating the ninth-century wars between 
the Irish and the Danish and Norse pirates. Thus the Scandinavians came 
to be called 'the Lochlannach' and the Danish King of Dublin was also 
styled 'K ing of Lochlin' . When the cult of the Scandinavian god Odin, 
the rune-maker and magician, was brought to Ireland he was identified 
with his counterpart Gwydion who in the fourth century B.C. had brought 
a new system of letters with him to Britain, and had been enrolled as a son 
of Danu or Don. Moreover, according to the legend, the Danaans had 
come to Britain from Greece by way of Denmark to which they had given 
the name of their goddess, and in mediaeval Ireland Danaan and Dane 
became confused, the Danes of the ninth century A . D . getting credit for 
Bronze A g e monuments. So 'Deon of Lochlin' must stand for 'the Danes 
of Dublin' . These pirates with their sea-raven flag were the terror of the 
Welsh, and the minstrel to the Danes of Dublin was probably the sea-
raven, sacred to Odin, who croaked over their victims. If so, the answer 
to the riddle was 'Morvran' (sea-raven), who was the son of Caridwen 
and, according to the Romance of Kilhwch and Olwen, the ugliest man in 
the world. In the Triads he is said to have escaped alive from the Battle of 
Camlan—another of the 'Three Frivolous Battles of Britain'—because 
everyone shrank from him. He must be identified with Afagddu, son of 
Caridwen, for whom the same supreme ugliness is claimed in the Romance 
of Taliesin, and whom she determined to make as intelligent as he was 
ugly. 
I wondered whether 'Lleon of Lochlin', in the Myvyrian version, was 
a possible reading. Arthur had his Court at Caerlleon-upon-Usk and the 
word Caerlleon is generally taken to mean 'The Camp of the Legion' ; 
and certainly the two Caerlleons mentioned in the seventh-century Welsh 
Catalogue of Cities, Caerlleon-upon-Usk and Caerlleon-upon-Dee, are 
both there explained as Castra Legionis. If Gwion accepted this derivation 
93 
of the word the riddle would read: 'I was bard of the harp to the legions of 
Lochlin', and the answer would be the same. The name Leon occurs in 
Gwion 's Kadeir Teyrnon ( 'The Royal Chair '): 'the lacerated form of the 
corsleted Leon ' . But the context is corrupt and 'Leon' may be a descrip-
tive title of some lion-hearted prince, not a proper name. 
Then there was the riddle in stanza 8 to consider: 'I was on the horse's 
crupper of Eli and Enoch'—an alternative to the misleading Book of 
Enoch riddle in the Mabinogion version: 
I was instructor to Eli and Enoch 
of which the answer is 'Uriel ' . In both texts Elias is really a part of the 
heretical John the Baptist riddle, from which the Lapwing has done her 
best to distract attention; her false connexion of Elias and Enoch has been 
most subtly made. Fo r these two prophets are paired in various A p o -
cryphal Gospels—the History ofJoseph the Carpenter, the Acts of Pilate, 
the Apocalypse of Peter and the Apocalypse of Paul. In the Acts of Pilate, 
for instance, which was current in Wales in Latin translation, occurs the 
verse: 
I am Enoch who was translated hither by the word of the Lord, and 
here with me is Elias the Tishbite who was taken up in a chariot of fire. 
But the real riddle in the Mabinogion version proves to be: 'I was instructor 
to Enoch and Noah' . In this other version, 'I was on the horse's crupper 
of Eli and Enoch' , the mention of Elias is otiose: for Enoch, like Elias, was 
caught up alive into Heaven on a chariot drawn by fiery horses. So the 
answer again is Uriel, since 'Uriel ' means 'Flame of G o d ' . N o w perhaps I 
could also answer 'Uriel ' to the riddle 'I was in Caer Bedion'. For , accord-
ing to Geoffrey of Monmouth, a sacred fire was kept continually burning 
in a temple at Caer Bedion, or Bath, like that which burned in the House 
of God at Jerusalem. 
There is a variation between the texts: 'a day and a year in stocks and 
fetters' (line 30) and 'a year and a half in stocks and fetters' (stanza 15 ) . 
'A year and a ha l f makes no obvious sense, but 'a day and a year' can be 
equated with the Thirteen Prison Locks that guarded Elphin, if each lock 
was a 28-day month and he was released on the extra day of the 365. 
The ancient common-law month in Britain, according to Blackstone's 
Commentaries (2, IX, 142) is 28 days long, unless otherwise stated, and a 
lunar month is still popularly so reckoned, although a true lunar month, 
or lunation, from new moon to new moon, is roughly 29^ days long, and 
though thirteen is supposed to be an unlucky number. The pre-Christian 
calendar of thirteen four-week months, with one day over, was super-
seded by the Julian calendar (which had no weeks) based eventually on 
the year of twelve thirty-day Egyptian months with five days over. T h e 
94 
author of the Book of Enoch in his treatise on astronomy and the calendar 
also reckoned a year to be 364 days, though he pronounced a curse on all 
who did not reckon a month to be 30 days long. Ancient calendar-
makers seem to have interposed the day which had no month, and was 
not therefore counted as part of the year, between the first and last of 
their artificial 28-day months: so that the farmer's year lasted, from the 
calendar-maker's point of view, literally a year and a day. 
In the Welsh Romances the number thirteen is of constant occurrence: 
'Thirteen Precious Things ' , 'Thirteen Wonders of Britain', 'Thirteen 
Kingly Jewels ' . The Thirteen Prison Locks, then, were thirteen months 
and on the extra day, the D a y of Liberation, the D a y of the Divine Child, 
Elphin was set free. This day will naturally have fallen just after the 
winter solsdce—two days before Christmas, when the Romans had their 
mid-winter festival. I saw that if the true reading is 'in stocks and fetters 
a year and a day', then this clause should be attached to 'Primary chief 
bard am I to Elphin' , in line 1: for it was Elphin who was fettered. 
N o w , Gwynn Jones dissents from the usual view that the word Mabino-
gion means 'juvenile romances'; he suggests, by analogy with the Irish 
title Mac-ind-oic, applied to Angus of the Brugh, that it means 'tales of 
the son of a virgin mother' and shows that it was originally applied only 
to the four romances in which Pryderi son of Rhiannon appears. This 
'son of a virgin mother' is always born at the winter solstice; which gives 
point to the story of Phylip Brydydd's contention with the minstrels for 
the privilege of first presenting Prince Rhys Ieuanc with a song on Christ-
mas Day , and also his mention of Maelgwyn and Elphin in that context. 
T h e riddle in stanza 16, 'I have been in thebuttery', must refer to Kai , 
who was in charge of King Arthur's Buttery. The line, cleverly muddled 
up with the Barnacle riddle, should probably be attached to 'I was with 
my Lord in the highest sphere' (line 5 and stanza 5) , Kai appearing in the 
Triads as 'one of the three diademed chiefs of battle', possessed of 
magical powers. In the Romance of Olwen and Kilhwch there is this 
description of him: 
He could hold his breath under water for nine days and nights, and 
sleep for the same period. No physician could heal a wound inflicted by 
his sword. He could make himself at will as tall as the tallest tree in the 
wood. His natural heat was so great that in a deluge of rain whatever he 
carried in his hand remained dry a hand's-breadth above and below. 
On the coldest day he was like a glowing fuel to his comrades. 
This is close to the account given of the Sun-hero Cuchulain i is battle 
rage. But in the later Arthurian legends Kai had degenerated ini buffoon 
and Chief of the Cooks. 
9 5 
The memory of the thirteen-month year was kept alive in the pagan 
English countryside until at least the fourteenth century. The Ballad of 
Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar begins: 
But how many merry monthes be in theyeare? 
There are thirteen, I say; 
The mid-summer moon is the merryest of all, 
Next to the merry month of May. 
This has been altered in manifestly later ballad: 
There are twelve months in all the year 
As I hear many men say. 
But the merriest month in all the year 
Is the merry month of May. 
Chapter Six 
A VISIT TO SPIRAL C A S T L E 
M y suggested answers to the riddles of the Hones Taliesin were as follows: Babel 
Lo t or Lota 
Vran 
Salome 
Ne-esthan 
Hur 
David 
Taliesin 
Kai 
Caleb 
Hu Gadarn 
Morvran 
Gomer 
Rhea 
Idris 
Joseph 
Jesus 
Uriel 
This was as far as I could go without adopting the method of the cross-
word puzzler, which is to use the answers already secured as clues to the 
solution of the more difficult riddles that remain, but I made some 
progress with the riddle: 'I have been three periods in the Casde of 
Arianrhod. ' 
Arianrhod ( 'Silver wheel ') appears in the 107th Triad as the 'Silver-
circled daughter of Don ' , and is a leading character in the Romance of 
Math the Son of Mathonwy. No one familiar with the profuse variants of 
the same legend in every body of European myth can have doubts about 
her identity. She is the mother of the usual Divine Fish-Child Dylan who , 
after killing the usual Wren (as the N e w Yea r Robin does on St. Stephen's 
day) becomes L l ew L law Gyffes ('the L ion with the Steady Hand ' ) , the 
97 
usual handsome and accomplished Sun-hero with the usual Heavenly 
Twin at his side. Arianrhod then adopts the form of Blodeuwedd, the 
usual Love-goddess, treacherously (as usual) destroys Llew Llaw—the 
story is at least as old as the Babylonian Gilgamesh epic—and is then 
transformed first into the usual Owl of Wisdom and then into the usual 
Old-Sow-who-eats-her-farrow; so feeds on Llew's dead flesh. But L lew, 
whose soul has taken the form of the usual eagle, is then, as usual, restored 
to life. The story is given in full in Chapter Seventeen. 
In other words Arianrhod is one more aspect of Caridwen, or Cerrid-
wen, the White Goddess of Life-in-Death and Death-in-Life; and to be in 
the Castle of Arianrhod is to be in a royal purgatory awaiting resurrec-
tion. Fo r in primitive European belief it was only kings, chieftains and 
poets, or magicians, who were privileged to be reborn. Countless other 
less distinguished souls wandered disconsolately in the icy grounds of the 
Castle, as yet uncheered by the Christian hope of universal resurrection. 
Gwion makes this clear in his Marwnad y Milveib ( 'Elegy on the 
Thousand Children'). 
Incomprehensible numbers there were 
Maintained in a chilly hell 
Until the Fifth Age of the world, 
Until Christ should release the captives. 
Where was this purgatory situated? It must be distinguished from the 
Celtic Heaven, which was the Sun itself—a blaze of light (as we know 
from Armorican tradition) caused by the shining together of myriads of 
pure souls. Well , where should one expect to find it? In a quarter from 
which the Sun never shines. Where is that? In the cold North. H o w far 
to the North? Beyond the source of Boreas, the North Wind; for 'at the 
back of the North Wind '—a phrase used by Pindar to locate the land of 
the Hyperboreans—is still a popular Gaelic synonym for the Land of 
Death. But precisely where beyond the source of the North wind? Only a 
poet would be persistent enough to ask this last question. The poet is the 
unsatisfied child who dares to ask the difficult question which arises from 
the schoolmaster's answer to his simple question, and then the still more 
difficult question which arises from that. Surprisingly enough there is, on 
this occasion, a ready answer. Caer Arianrhod (not the submerged twon 
off the coast of Caernarvon, but the real Caer Arianrhod) is, according to 
Dr . Owen of the Welsh Dictionary, the constellation called 'Corona 
Borealis'. Not Corona Septentrionalis, 'the Northern Crown ' , but Corona 
Borealis, 'the Crown of the North Wind ' . Perhaps we have the answer 
here to the question which puzzled Herodotus: 'Who are the Hyper-
boreans?' Were the Hyperboreans, the 'back-of-the-North-Wind-men', 
members of a North Wind cult, as the Thracians of the Sea of Marmara 
98 
were? Did they believe that when-they died their souls were taken off 
by Hermes, conductor of souls, to the calm silver-circled castle at the 
back of the North Wind, of which the bright star Alpheta was the 
guardian? 
I should not venture to make such a fanciful suggestion if it were not 
for the mention of Oenopion and Tauropolus by the Scholiast on 
Apollonius Rhodius's Argonautica. This Corona Borealis, which is also 
called 'the Cretan Crown ' , was in ancient times sacred to a Cretan 
Goddess, wife to the God Dionysus, and according to this Scholiast the 
mother of—that is, worshipped by—Staphylus, Thoas, Oenopion, 
Tauropolus and others. These men were the eponymous ancestors of 
Pelasgo-Thracian clans or tribes settled in the Aegean islands of Chios 
and Lemnos, on the Thracian Chersonese, and in the Crimea, and cultur-
ally connected with North-Western Europe. The Goddess was Ariadne, 
('Most Holy ' , ) alias Alpheta—alpha and eta being the first and last letters 
of her name. She was the daughter, or younger self, of the ancient Cretan 
Moon-Goddess Pasiphae, 'She who shines for all ', and the Greeks made 
her a sister of their ancient vine-hero Deucalion, who survived the Great 
Flood. Ariadne, on whom 'Arianrhod' seems to be modelled, was an 
orgiastic goddess, and it is evident from the legends of Lemnos, Chios, the 
Chersonese and the Crimea, that male human sacrifice was an integral 
part of her worship, as it was among the pre-Roman devotees of the 
White Goddess of Britain. Orpheus himself, who lived 'among the savage 
Cauconians' close to Oenopion's home, was a sacred victim of her fury. 
He was torn in pieces by a pack of delirious women intoxicated by ivy 
and also, it seems, by the toadstool sacred to Dionysus. Eratosthenes of 
Alexandria, quoting Aeschylus's Bassarides, records that Orpheus 
refused to conform to local religion but 'believed the sun, whom he named 
Apol lo , to be the greatest of the gods. Rising up in the night he ascended 
before dawn to the mountain called Pangaeum that he might see the sun 
first. At which Dionysus, being enraged, sent against him the Bassarids, 
who tore him in p i e c e s . . . . ' That is a dishonest way of telling the story. 
Proclus in his commentary on Plato is more to the point: 'Orpheus, 
because he was the leader in the Dionysian rites, is said to have suffered 
the same fate as the god. ' But the head of Orpheus continued to sing and 
prophesy, like thatof the God Bran. Orpheus, according to Pausanias, 
was worshipped by the Pelasgians, and the termination eus is always a 
proof of antiquity in a Greek name. 'Orpheus', like 'Erebus' , the name of 
the Underworld over which the White Goddess ruled, is derived by 
grammarians from the root ereph, which means 'to cover or conceal'. 
It was the Moon-goddess, not the Sun-god, who originally inspired 
Orpheus. 
The clearest sign that in Arianrhod we have the old matriarchal 
99 
Triple Goddess, or White Goddess, lies in her giving her son Llew Llaw 
a name and a set of arms. In patriarchal society it is always the father who 
gives both. Llew Llaw has no father at all, in the Romance, and must 
remain anonymous until his mother is tricked into making a man of him. 
I thought at first that Gwion 's riddle about Caer Arianrhod was to be 
completed with 'and the whirling round without motion between three 
elements'. The three elements are clearly fire, air and water, and the 
Corona Borealis revolves in a very small space compared with the southern 
constellations. But Gwion must have been taught that Arianrhod's Castle 
does not lie within 'the Arctic Circle' , which includes the two Bears and 
the Bear-Warden, and that when the Sun rises in the House of the 
Crab, it begins to dip over the Northern horizon and does not free itself 
until the summer is over. To describe it as whirling round without 
motion would have been inaccurate; only the Little Bear does so, 
pivoted on the Pole-star. (As I show in Chapter Ten, the whirling-
round is part of the riddle to which the answer is Rhea; but I will not 
anticipate the argument at this point.) 
Ye t , even if I knew the meaning o f ' a period in the Castle of Arianrhod', 
could I answer the riddle? W h o spent three periods there? 
The sequences of 'I have been' or 'I am'—the earliest of them indisput-
ably pre-Christian—which occur in so many bardic poems of Wales and 
Ireland seem to have several different though related senses. The primi-
tive belief is plainly not in individual metempsychosis of the vulgar 
Indian sort—at one time a bluebottle, at the next a flower, at the next 
perhaps a Brahmini bull or a woman, according to one's merit. The T is 
the Apollo-like god on whose behalf the inspired poet sings, not the poet 
himself. Sometimes the god may be referring mythically to his daily cycle 
as the Sun from dawn to dawn; sometimes to his yearly cycle from winter 
solstice to winter solstice with the months as stations of his progress; 
perhaps sometimes even to his grand cycle of 25,800 years around the 
Zodiac All these cycles are types of one anodier; as we still speak either 
of the 'evening' or 'autumn' of our lives when we mean old age. 
The commonest 'I have been' reference is to the yearly cycle, and to 
examine these seasonal 'I have been's (though for reasons of discretion 
the order has always been deliberately confused) is usually to find that they 
contain a complete series of round-the-year symbols. 
/ am water, I am a wren, 
I am a workman, I am a star, 
I am a serpent; 
I am a cell, I am a chink, 
I am a depository of song, 
I am a learned person, e t c 
100 
Though the Pythagorean theory of metempsychosis, imported from 
the Greek colonies in Southern France, has been suspected in the Irish 
legend of Tuan MacCairill, one of the royal immigrants from Spain, who 
went through the successive metamorphoses of stag, boar, hawk and 
salmon before being born as a man, this is unlikely: the four beasts are all 
seasonal symbols, as will be shown. 
The poetic language of myth and symbol used in ancient Europe was 
not, in principle, a difficult one but became confused, with the passage of 
time, by frequent modifications due to religious, social and linguistic 
change, and by the tendency of history to taint the purity of myth—that 
is to say, the accidental events in the life of a king who bore a divine name 
were often incorporated in the seasonal myth which gave him the title to 
royalty. A further complication was that anciently a large part of poetic 
education, to judge from the Irish Book of Ballymote, which contains a 
manual of cryptography, was concerned with making the language as 
difficult as possible in order to keep the secret close; in the first three years 
of his educational course, the Irish student for the OUaveship had to 
master one hundred and fifty cypher-alphabets. 1 
What is the relation of Caer Sidi to Caer Arianrhod? Were they the 
same place? I think not, because Caer Sidi has been identified with Puffin 
Island off the coast of Anglesey and with Lundy Island in the Severn: 
both of them island Elysiums of the usual type. A clue to the problem is 
that though Caer Sidi, or Caer Sidin, means 'Revolving Castle' in Welsh, 
and though revolving islands are common in Welsh and Irish legend, the 
word 'Sidi ' is apparently a translation of the Goidelic word Sidhe, a 
round barrow fortress belonging to the Aes Sidhe (Sidhe for short), the 
prime magicians of Ireland. There are several 'Fortresses of the Sidhe' in 
Ireland, the most remarkable ones being Brugh-na-Boyne (now called 
'New Grange ' ) , Knowth and Dowth, on the northern banks of the River 
Boyne. Their date and religious use must be considered in detail. 
N e w Grange is the largest, and is said to have been originally occupied 
by The Dagda himself, the Tuatha de Danaan Father-god who corres-
ponds with the Roman Saturn, but afterwards by his Apollo-like son 
Angus who won it from him by a legal quibble. The Dagda on his first 
arrival in Ireland was evidendy a son of the Triple Goddess Brigit ('the 
High One') ; but the myth has been tampered with by successive editors. 
First, he is said to have married the Triple Goddess. Then he is said to 
have had only one wife with three names, Breg, Meng and Meabel ( 'Lie , 
Guile and Disgrace') , who bore him three daughters all called Brigit. 
Then it is said that not he but three of his descendants, Brian, Iuchar and 
1 'The Thirteen Precious Things', 'The Thirteen Kingly Jewels', 'The Thirteen Wonders of 
Britain', e t c , mentioned in the Mabinogion are likely to represent sets of cypher equivalents 
for the thirteen consonants of the British Beth-Luis-Nion alphabet 
I O I 
Iuchurba married three princesses who together owned Ireland—Eire, 
Fodhla and Banbha. He was the son of 'Eladu' which the Irish glossarists 
explain as 'Science or Knowledge ' but which may be a form of the Greek 
Elate ('fir-tree'); Elatos ('fir-man') was an early Achaean King of Cyllene, 
a mountain in Arcadia sacred to Demeter and later renowned for its 
college of learned and sacrosanct heralds. The Dagda and Elatos may thus 
both be equated with Osiris, or Adonis , or Dionysus, who was born 
from a fir and mothered by the horned Moon-goddess Isis, or Io , or 
Hathor. 
New Grange is a flat-topped round barrow, about a quarter of a mile in 
circumference and fifty feet high. But it is built of heaped stones, some 
50,000 tons of them, not of earth, and was originally covered with white 
quartz pebbles: a Bronze A g e sepulchral practice in honour of the White 
Goddess which may account in part for the legends of Kings housed after 
death in glass castles. Ten enormous stone herms, weighing eight or ten 
tons apiece stand in a semi-circle around the southern base of the barrow, 
and one formerly stood at the summit. It is not known how many more 
have been removed from the semi-circle but the gaps suggest an original 
set of twelve.' A hedge of about a hundred long flat stones, set edge 
to edge, rings the base around. Deep inside the barrow is a pre-Celtic 
passage-burial cave built with great slabs of stone, several of them 
measuring as much as seven feet by four. 
The ground plan is the shape of a Celtic cross; one enters by a dolmen 
door at the base of the shaft. The shaft consists of a narrow passage, sixtyfeet long, through which one has to crawl on hands and knees. It leads to a 
small circular chamber, with a bee-hive corbelled vault twenty feet high; 
and there are three recesses which make the arms of the cross. When this 
cave was re-discovered in 1699 l t contained three large empty boat-
shaped stone basins, the sides engraved with stripes; two complete 
skeletons lying beside a central altar, stags' antlers, bones, and nothing 
else. Roman gold coins of the fourth century A . D . , gold torques and 
remains of iron weapons were later found on the site of the fort, not in the 
cave. The fort was sacked by the Danes but there is nothing to show 
whether they, or earlier invaders, rifled the chamber of its other funerary 
furniture. Slabs of the doorway and of the interior are decorated with 
spiral patterns and there is forked lightning carved on one lintel. Since the 
old poets record that each rath was presided over by an enchantress and 
since, as will be shown, the Sidhe were such skilful poets that even the 
Druids were obliged to go to them for the spells that they needed, it 
seems likely that the original Caer Sidi, where the Cauldron of Inspiration 
was housed, was a barrow of the N e w Grange sort. F o r these barrows 
were fortresses above and tombs below. The Irish 'Banshee' fairy is a 
Bean-Sidhe ( 'Woman of the Hill ' ) ; as priestess of the great dead she wails 
102 
in prophetic anticipation whenever anyone of royal blood is about to die. 
From an incident in the Irish romance of Fiona's Boyhood, it appears that 
the entrances to these burial caves were left open at Samhain, Al l Souls ' 
E v e , which was also celebrated as a feast of the Dead in Ancient Greece, to 
allow the spirits of the heroes to come out for an airing; and that the 
interiors were illuminated until cock-crow the next morning. 
On the east side of the mound, diametrically opposite the entrance, a 
stone was discovered in 1901 which has three suns carved on it, two of 
them with their rays enclosed in a circle as if in prison, the other free. 
Above them is a much rougher, unenclosed sun and above that, notched 
across a straight line, the Ogham letters B and I—which, as will be 
explained presently, are the first and last letters of the ancient Irish 
alphabet, dedicated respectively to Inception and Death. The case is 
pretty plain: the sacred kings of Bronze A g e Ireland, who were solar 
kings of a most primitive type, to judge by the taboos which bound them 
and by the reputed effect of their behaviour on crops and hunting, were 
buried beneath these barrows; but their spirits went to 'Caer Sidi ' , the 
Castle of Ariadne, namely Corona Borealis. Thus the pagan Irish could 
call N e w Grange 'Spiral Castle' and, revolving a fore-finger in explana-
tion, could say, 'Our king has gone to Spiral Castle': in other words, 'he 
is dead'. A revolving wheel before the door of a castle is common in 
Goidelic legend. According to Keating, the magic fortress of the enchan-
tress Blanaid, in the Isle of Man, was protected by one—nobody could 
enter until it was still. In front of the doorway of N e w Grange there is a 
broad slab carved with spirals, which forms part of the stone hedge. The 
spirals are double ones: follow the lines with your finger from outside to 
inside and when you reach the centre, there is the head of another spiral 
coiled in the reverse direction to take you out of the maze again. So the 
pattern typifies death and rebirth; though, according to Gwion ' s poem 
Preiddeu Annwm, 'only seven ever returned from Caer Sidi ' . It may well 
be that oracular serpents were once kept in these sepulchral caves, and 
that these were the serpents which St. Patrick expelled, though perhaps 
only metaphorically. Delphi, the home of Apol lo , was once an oracular 
tomb of this same sort, with a spiralled python and a prophetic priestess 
of the Earth Goddess, and the 'omphalos' or 'navel shrine' where the 
python was originally housed, was built underground in the same bee-
hive style, which derives originally from the African masabo, or ghost-
house. The antlers at New Grange were probably part of the sacred king's 
head-dress, like the antlers worn by the Gaulish god Cernunnos, and the 
horns of Moses, and those of Dionysus and K i n g Alexander shown on 
coins. 
The provenience of the bee-hive tomb with a passage entrance and 
lateral niches is no mystery. It came to Ireland from the Eastern Mediter-
103 
ranean by way of Spain and Portugal at the close of the third millennium 
B.C.: the corbelled roof of N e w Grange occurs also at Tirbradden, D o w t h 
and Seefin. But the eight double-spirals at the entrance, which are merely 
juxtaposed, not cunningly wreathed together in the Cretan style, are 
paralleled in Mycenaean Greece; and this suggests that the carvings were 
made by the Danaans when they took over the shrine from the previous 
occupants, who in Irish history appear as the tribes of Partholan and 
Nemed that invaded the country in the years 2048 and 1 7 1 8 B.C. , coming 
from Greece by way of Spain. If so, this would account for the legend of 
the usurpation of the shrine by the god Angus from his father The Dagda. 
The arrival of the Danaans in Ireland, as was mentioned in Chapter I I I , is 
dated in the Book of Invasions at the middle of the fifteenth century B .C. 
This is plausible: they will have been late-comers of the round-barrow 
tribes that first reached Ireland from Britain about 1700 B .C. That they 
propitiated the heroes of the previous cult is well established: their food-
vessels are found in passage-grave burials. 
D r . R. S. Macalister in his Ancient Ireland (1935) takes an original 
v iew of New Grange. He holds that it was built by the Milesians, whom he 
dates about 1000 B . C . and supposes to have come from Britain, not Spain, 
on the ground that it incorporates a number of ornamental stones in the 
passage and chamber, one of them with its pattern broken, apparently 
arranged haphazard, and that on some of these the carving has been 
defaced by pick-surfacing like that found on the trilithons of Stonehenge. 
This is to suggest that it is a mock-antique in the style of several hundred 
years before; a theory to which no other archaeologist of repute seems to 
have subscribed. But his observations do suggest that the Milesians took 
over the oracular shrine from the Danaans and patched it, where it showed 
signs of decay, with ornamental stones borrowed from other burials. 
Another suggestion of his carries greater conviction: that Angus ' Brugh 
('palace') was not N e w Grange but a huge circular enclosure not far off 
in a bend of the Boyne, which may have been an amphitheatre for funerary 
games in connexion with all the many burials of the neighbourhood. 
Most Irish archaeologists are now, I find, agreed that N e w Grange was 
built by a matriarchal passage-grave-making people that first reached 
Ireland about the year 2100 B.C. , but not until they had become well-
established some five hundred years later and were able to command the 
enormous labour necessary for the task. The spirals, though paralleled 
in Mycenean shaft-burials of 1600 B .C . , may be far earlier since examples 
of unknown date occur also at Malta. On one of the outer stones a symbol 
is carved which suggests a Cretan ideogram and apparently represents a 
ship with a high prow and stern and a single large sail; beside it are vertical 
scratches and a small circle. Christopher Hawkes, my principal informant 
on this subject, has written to me that not only are the skeletons and 
104 
antlers unlikely to be co-eval with the building but that there may have 
been many successive despoilments of the burial before they were put 
there. The original funerary furniture cannot be guessed at, since no 
virgin passage-grave of this type has been opened in recent years; we must 
waituntil the Cairn of Queen Maeve is opened. This overlooks Sligo 
Bay; it is built of some 40,000 tons of stone and the entrance is lost. We 
may have to wait a long time, because the Sligo people are superstitious 
and would consider a desecration of the tomb unlucky: Maeve is Mab, the 
Queen of Faery. 
What the basins contained may be inferred from Exodus, XXIV 
(verses 4-8) . Moses, having set up twelve stone herms, or posts, at the 
foot of a sacred hill, offered bull-sacrifices and sprinkled half the blood on a 
thirteenth herm in the middle of the circle, or semi-circle; the rest of the 
blood" he put into basins, which must have been of considerable size. 
Then he and his colleague Aaron, with seventy-two companions, went up 
to feast on the roasted flesh. On this occasion, the blood in the basins was 
sprinkled on the people as a charm of sanctification; but its use in the 
oracular shrine was always to feed the ghost of the dead hero and to 
encourage him to return from Caer Sidi or Caer Arianrhod to answer 
questions of importance. 
The visit of Aeneas, mistletoe-bough in hand, to the Underworld to 
cross-examine his father Anchises must be read in this sense. Aeneas 
sacrificed a bull and let the blood gush into a trough, and the ghost of 
Anchises (who had married the Love-goddess Venus Erycina, and been 
killed by lightning and was, in fact, a sacred king of the usual Herculean 
type), drank the blood and obligingly prophesied about the glories of 
Rome. Of course, the ghost did not really lap the blood, but a lapping 
sound was heard in the dark; what happened was that the Sibyl , who con-
ducted Aeneas below, drank the blood and it produced in her the desired 
prophetic ecstasy. That Sibyls acted so is known from the case of the 
Priestess of Mother Earth at Aegira ( 'Black Poplar', a tree sacred to heroes) 
in Achaea. The peeping and muttering of ghosts on such occasions is 
understandable: two or three Biblical texts refer to the queer bat-like 
voices in which demons, or familiars, speak through the mouths of pro-
phets or prophetesses. Bull 's blood was most potent magic and was used, 
diluted with enormous quantities of water, to fertilize fruit-trees in Crete 
and Greece. Taken neat it was regarded as a poison deadly to anyone but a 
Sibyl or a priest of Mother Earth; Jason's father and mother died from a 
draught of it. So did ass-eared King Midas of Gordium. 
That bull's blood was used for divination in ancient Ireland is not mere 
supposition. A rite called 'The Bull Feast ' is mentioned in the Book of the 
Dun Cow. 
I O J 
A white bull was killed and a man ate his fill of the flesh and drank of 
the broth; and a spell of truth was chanted over him as he slept off the 
meal. He would see in a dream the shape and appearance of the man 
who should be made king, and the sort of work in which he was at that 
time engaged. 
The white bull recalls the sacred white bulls of the Gaulish mistletoe rite; 
the white bull on which the Thracian Dionysus rode; the white bulls 
sacrificed on the Alban Mount and at the Roman Capitol; and the white 
bull representing the true seed of Israel in the apocalyptic Book of Enoch. 
N o w we begin to understand the mysterious Preiddeu Annwm ('the 
Spoils of Annwm') in which—between Gwion 's interpolative taunts at 
the ignorance of Heinin and the other court-bards—one Gwair ap 
Geirion laments that he cannot escape from Caer Sidi. The refrain is: 
'Except seven none returned from Caer Sidi. ' We know at least two who 
did return: Theseus and Daedalus, both Attic Sun-heroes. The stories of 
Theseus's expedition to the Underworld and of his adventure in the 
Cretan labyrinth of Cnossos are really two parts of a single confused 
myth. Theseus ('he who disposes') goes naked, except for his lion-skin, 
to the centre of the maze, there kills the bull-headed monster of the 
double-axe—the labris from which the word 'labyrinth' is derived—and 
returns safely: and the goddess who enables him to do so is the Goddess 
Ariadne whom the Welsh called Arianrhod. In the second part of the 
myth he fails in his Underworld expedition: he has to be rescued by 
Hercules, and his companion Peirithous remains behind like Gwair , 
perpetually sighing for deliverance. The myth of the hero who defeats 
Death was combined by the Greek mythographers with a historical 
event: the sack of the labyrinthine palace of Cnossos by Danaan raiders 
from Greece about 1400 B.C. and the defeat of King Minos, the Bull-king. 
Daedalus ('the bright one') similarly escapes from the Cretan labyrinth, 
guided by the Moon-goddess Pasiphae, but without using violence; he 
was a Sun-hero of the Aegean colonists of Cumae, and of the Sardinians, 
as well as of the Athenians. 
Caer Sidi in the Preiddeu Annwm is given a new synonym in each of the 
seven stanzas. It appears as Caer R igor ('the royal castle') with a pun 
maybe on the Latin rigor moras; Caer Colur ('the g loomy casde'); Caer 
Pedryvan ('four-cornered castle'), four times revolving; Caer Vediwid 
('the castle of the perfect ones'); Caer Ochren ('the castle of the shelving 
side'—i.e. entered from the side of a slope); Caer Vandwy ('the casde on 
high') . 
I do not know who the canonical seven were, but among those eligible 
for the honour were Theseus, Hercules, Amathaon, Arthur, Gwydion , 
Harpocrates, K a y , Owain, Daedalus, Orpheus and Cuchulain. (When 
106 
Cuchulain, mentioned by Gwion in a poem, harrowed Hell, he brought 
back three cows and a magic cauldron.) Aeneas is unlikely to have been 
one of the seven. He did not die as the others did; he merely visited an 
oracular cave, just as King Saul had done at Endor, or Caleb at Machpelah. 
The casde that they entered—revolving, remote, royal, gloomy, lofty, 
cold, the abode of the Perfect Ones, with four corners, entered by a dark 
door on the shelving side of a hill—was the castle of death or the T o m b , 
the Dark Tower to which Childe Roland came in the ballad. This descrip-
tion fits the New Grange burial cave, but 'four-cornered' refers, I think, 
to the kist-vaen method of burial which was invented by the pre-Greek 
inhabitants of Northern Greece and the islands about Delos and thence 
conveyed to Western Europe by Bronze A g e immigrants, the round-
barrow men: the kist being a small rectangular stone box in which the dead 
body was laid in a crouched position. Odysseus may be said to have been 
'three periods in the castle of Arianrhod' because he entered with twelve 
companions into the Cyclops ' cave, but escaped; was detained by 
Calypso on Ogygia , but escaped; and by the enchantress Circe on Aeaea 
—another sepulchral island—but escaped. Y e t it is unlikely that 
Odysseus is intended: I think that Gwion is referring to Jesus Christ, 
whom the twelfth-century poet Dafydd Benfras makes visit a Celtic 
Annwm, and who escaped from the gloomy cave in the hillside in which 
he had been laid by Joseph of Arimathea. But how was Jesus 'three periods 
in the Castle of Arianrhod'? I take this for a heresy making Jesus, as the 
Second Adam, a reincarnation of Adam, and, as the Davidic Messiah, a 
reincarnation also of David. The A g e of Adam and the A g e of David are 
particularized in Gwion 's Divregwawd Taliesin. Jesus is pictured there at 
still waiting in the heavens for the dawn of the Seventh A g e : 'Was it nos 
to Heaven he went when he departed hence? And at the D a y of Judge-
ment he will come to us here. Fo r the fifth age was the blessed one of 
David the Prophet. The sixth age is the age of Jesus, which shalll last till 
the D a y of Judgement. ' In the Seventh A g e he would be called Taiesin. 
P R E I D D E U A N N W M 
(The Spoils of Annwm) 
Praise to the Lord, Supreme Ruler of the Heavens, 
Who hath extended his dominion to the shore of the world. 
Complete was the prison of Gwair in Caer Sidi 
Through the spite of Pwyll and Pryderi.No one before him went into it; 
A heavy blue chain firmly held the youth, 
And for the spoils ofAnnwm gloomily he sings, 
And till doom shall he continue his lay. 
107 
Thrice the fullness of Prydwen we went into it; 
Except seven, none returned from Caer Sidi. 
Am I not a candidate for fame, to be heard in the song? 
In Caer Pedryvanfour times revolving, 
The first word from the cauldron, when was it spoken? 
By the breath of rune damsels it is gently warmed. 
Is it not the cauldron ofthe chiefofAnnwm, in its fashion 
JVith a ridge around its edge of pearls? 
It will not boil the food ofa coward or one forsworn, 
A sword brightflashing to him will be brought, 
And left in the hand of Lleminawg, 
And before the portals ofthe coldplace the horns of light shall be 
burning. 
And when we went with Arthur in his splendid labours, 
Except seven, none returned from Caer Vediwid. 
Am I not a candidate for fame, to be heard in the song? 
In the four-cornered enclosure, in the island of the strong door, 
Where the twilight and the black of night move together, 
Bright wine was the beverage of the host. 
Three times the fulness ofPrydwen, we went on sea, 
Except seven, none returned from Caer Rigor. 
I will not allow praise to the lords of literature. 
Beyond Caer Wydr they behold not the prowess of Arthur. 
Three times twenty-hundred men stood on the wall. 
It was difficult to converse with their sentinel. 
Three times the fulness of Prydwen, we went with Arthur. 
Except seven, none returned from Caer Colur. 
I will not allow praise to the men with trailing shields. 
They know not on what day, or who caused it, 
Or at what hour of the splendid day Cwy was born, 
Or who prevented him from going to the dales ofDevwy. 
They know not the brindled ox, with his thick head band, 
And seven-score knobs in his collar. 
And when we went with Arthur of mournful memory, 
Except seven, none returned from Caer Vindwy. 
I will not allow praise to men ofdrooping courage, 
They know not on what day the chief arose, 
Or at what hour in the splendid day the owner was born; 
Or what animal they keep of silver head. 
When we went with Arthur of mournful contention, 
Except seven, none returned from Caer Ochren. 
108 
Pwyl l and Pryderi were successive rulers of the 'Africans' of Annwm 
in Pembroke, the earliest invaders of Wales; at their death, like Minos 
and Rhadamanthus of Crete, they became Lords of the Dead. It was from 
Pryderi, son of Rhiannon, that Gwydion stole the sacred swine and Gwair 
seems to have gone on a similar marauding expedition in the company of 
Arthur; for his prison called, in Triad Si, the Castle of Oeth and Anoeth 
is also the prison from which, according to Triad So, Arthur was rescued 
by his page Goreu, son of Custennin; Gwair is thus to Arthur as 
Peirithous was to Theseus, and Goreu is to Arthur as Hercules was to 
Theseus. Possibly Gwion in the Romance is counting on the court-
bards to guess 'Arthur' , not 'Jesus ' , as the answer to 'I was three periods 
in the Castle of Arianrhod', since in Triad 5o Arthur is said to have been 
rescued by this same Goreu from three prisons—the Castle of Oeth 
and Anoeth; the Castle of Pendragon ( 'Lord of Serpents'); the Dark 
Prison under the Stone—all of them death-prisons. Or is he covertly 
presenting Jesus as an incarnation of Arthur? 
Prydwen was King Arthur 's magic ship; Llaminawg, in whose hands 
Arthur left the flashing sword, appears in the Morte D'Arthur as 'Sir 
Bedivere' . Caer W y d r is Glastonbury, or Inis Gutrin, thought of as the 
glass castle 1 in which Arthur's soul was housed after death; Glastonbury is 
also the Isle of Avalon (Appletrees) to which his dead body was con-
veyed by Morgan le Faye . The heavy blue chain is the water around the 
Island of Death. T h e myth of C w y , like that of Gwair and Arthur, is no 
longer extant, but the 'animal with the silver head' is perhaps the White 
Roebuck of which we are in search, and the name of the Ox ' s headband 
is one of the prime bardic secrets which Gwion in his Cyst JVy'r Beirdd 
( 'Reproof of the Bards') taunts Heinin with not possessing: 
The name ofthe firmament, 
The name of the elements, 
And the name of the language, 
And the name of the Head-band. 
Avaunt,ye bards— 
About a hundred years before Gwion wrote this, the Glastonbury 
monks had dug up an oak coffin, from sixteen feet underground, which 
they claimed to be Arthur's, and faked a Gothic inscription on a leaden 
1 Caer W y d r (Glass Casde) is a learned pun of Gwion's. The town of Glastonbury is said 
by William of Malmesbury to have been named after its secular founder Glasteing, who came 
there from the north with his twelve brothers at some time before 600. T he Latin equivalent 
of Gutrin was vitrinus; and the Saxon was glas. This colour word covered any shade between deep 
blue and light-green—it could be applied equally to Celtic blue enamel and Roman bottle-
glass. T h e 'glass' castles of Irish, Manx and Welsh legend are thus seen to be either island 
shrines, surrounded by glassy-green water, or star-prisons islanded in the dark-blue night 
sky; but in mediaeval legend they were made of glass, and their connexion with death and 
with the Moon-goddess has been preserved in the popular superstition that it is unlucky to 
see the Moon through glass. 
109 
cross a foot long, said to have been found inside, which Giraldus Cam-
brensis saw and believed authentic. I think Gwion is here saying: ' Y o u 
bards think that Arthur's end was in that oak coffin at Glastonbury. I 
know better.' The inscription ran: 'Here lies buried the renowned King 
Arthur with Guenevere his second wife in the Isle of Avalon. ' 
It will be objected that man has as valid a claim to divinity as woman. 
That is true only in a sense; he is divine not in his single person, but only 
in his twinhood. As Osiris, the Spirit of the Waxing Year he is always 
jealous of his wierd, Set, the Spirit of the Waning Year , and vice-versa; he 
cannot be both of them at once except by an intellectual effort that 
destroys his humanity, and this is the fundamental defect of the Apo l -
lonian or Jehovistic cult. Man is a demi-god: he always has either one 
foot or the other in the grave; woman is divine because she can keep both 
her feet always in the same place, whether in the sky, in the underworld, 
or on this earth. Man envies her and tells himself lies about his own com-
pleteness, and thereby makes himself miserable; because if he is divine she 
is not even a demi-goddess—she is a mere nymph and his love for her 
turns to scorn and hate. 
Woman worships the male infant, not the grown man: it is evidence of 
her deity, of man's dependence on her for life. She is passionately in-
terested in grown men, however, because the love-hate that Osiris and 
Set feel for each other on her account is a tribute to her divinity. She tries 
to satisfy both, but can only do so by alternate murder, and man tries to 
regard this as evidence of her fundamental falsity, not of his own irrecon-
cilable demands on her. 
The joke is that the monks had really, it seems, discovered the body of 
Arthur, or G w y n , or whatever the original name of the Avalon hero was. 
Christopher Hawkes describes in his Prehistoric Foundations of Europe this 
form of burial: 
Inhumation (and more rarely burial after cremation in tree-trunk 
coffins covered by a barrow) was already practised in Schleswig-
Holstein in the beginning of its Bronze A g e . . . . It is probable that the 
coffin originally represented a dug-out boat, and that the idea of a 
voyage by water to the next world, well attested in Scandinavia in the 
later Bronze A g e and again in the Iron A g e down to its famous cul-
mination in Viking times, is here to be recognized at its first beginning, 
inspired, it may well be, ultimately from E g y p t through the Baltic con-
nexions with theSouth now passing along the Amber Route. The same 
rite of boat- or coffin-burial appears simultaneously in Britain in the 
middle centuries of the second millennium, when the North Sea trade-
route was flourishing, and penetrates the Wessex culture along the 
south coast where the burial at Hove noted for its Scandinavian 
n o 
affinities [it contained a handled cup of Baltic amber] was of this type, 
but more prominent on the east coast, especially in Yorkshire where 
the Irish route over the Pennines [barter of Irish gold against Baldc 
amber] reached the sea. The classic example is the Gristhorpe coffin-
burial near Scarborough [an oak coffin containing the skeleton of an 
old man, with oak-branches and what appeared to be mistletoe over it], 
but the recent discovery in the great barrow of Loose Howe on the 
Cleveland Moors of a primary burial with no less than three boat dug-
outs must henceforward stand at the head of the series and serve to 
show how the same rite took hold among the seafarers on both sides 
of the North Sea between about 1600 and 1400 B .C. 
T h e nine damsels of the cauldron recall the nine virgins of the Isle of 
Sein in Western Brittany in the early fifth century A . D . , described by 
Pomponius Mela. They were possessed of magical powers and might be 
approached by those who sailed to consult them. 1 
The sacred king, then, is a Sun-king and returns at death to the 
Universal Mother, the White Moon Goddess, who imprisons him in the 
extreme north. W h y the north? Because that is the quarter from which 
the Sun never shines, from which the wind brings snow; only dead 
suns are to be found in the cold polar north. The Sun-god is born at mid-
winter when the Sun is weakest and has attained his most southerly 
station; therefore his representative, the Sun-king, is killed at the summer 
solstice when the Sun attains his most northerly station. The relation 
between Caer Sidi and Caer Arianrhod seems to be that the burial place 
of the dead king was a barrow on an island, either in the river or the sea, 
where his spirit lived under charge of oracular and orgiastic priestesses; 
but his soul went to the stars and there hopefully awaited rebirth in an-
other king. And the evidence of the oak coffin at the Isle of Avalon points 
plainly to the derivation of the Arthur cult from the Eastern Mediter-
ranean by way of the Amber Route, the Baltic and Denmark, between 
1600 and 1400 B.C.; though the cult of other oracular heroes in Britain and 
Ireland is likely to be seven or eight centuries older. 
In Britain the tradition of Spiral Castle survives in the Easter Maze 
dance of country villages, the mazes being called ' T r o y T o w n ' in England 
and in Wales 'Caer-droia' . The Romans probably named them after the 
T r o y Game, a labyrinthine dance of Asia Minor, performed by young 
1 T h e Island of Sein, which is not far from the great religious centre of Camac and must 
have had a ritual connexion with it, retained its magical reputation very late. It was the last 
place in Europe to be Christianized: by seventeenth-century Jesuits. The island women wear 
the highest head-dresses in Brittany—the nine priestesses must have worn the same—and 
until recendy had a reputation for enticing sailors to destruction on the rocks by witchcraft. 
There are two megalithic menhirs on the island, which is completely treeless, but no archaeo-
logical excavations have yet been made there. 
I l l 
noblemen at Rome under the Early Empire in memory of their Trojan 
origin; but Pliny records that Latin children performed it too. In Delos it 
was called the Crane Dance and was said to record the escape of Theseus 
from the Labyrinth. The maze dance seems to have come to Britain from 
the Eastern Mediterranean with the N e w Stone A g e invaders of the third 
millennium B.C., since ancient rough stone mazes of the same pattern as the 
English are found in Scandinavia and North-eastern Russia. On a rock 
slab near Bosinney in Cornwall two mazes are carved; and another is 
carved on a massive granite block from the Wicklow Hills, now in the 
Dublin National Museum. These mazes have the same pattern, too: 
the Labyrinth of Daedalus shown on Cretan coins. 
112 
Chapter Seven 
GWION'S RIDDLE SOLVED 
/m Goidelic alphabet, called Ogham, was used in Britain and Ireland 
f—\ some centuries before the introduction of the Latin A B G Its 
J. \. invention is credited in the mediaeval Irish Book of Ballymote to 
'Ogma Sun-face son of Breas'—one of the early gods of the Goidels. Ogma, 
according to Lucian, who wrote in the second century A .D . , was pictured 
as a veteran Hercules, with club and lion-skin, drawing crowds of prisoners 
along with golden chains connected by their ears to the tip of his tongue. 
The alphabet consisted of twenty letters—fifteen consonants and five 
vowels—apparendy corresponding to a deaf-and-dumb finger-language. 
Numerous examples of this alphabet occur in ancient stone inscriptions 
in Ireland, the Isle of Man, North and South Wales, and Scotland; with 
one at Silchester in Hampshire, the capital of the Atrebates who took 
part in the Second Belgic Invasion of Britain between Julius Caesar's raid 
and the Claudian conquest. Here are two versions: the first quoted from 
Brynmor-Jones and Rhys ' s History of the Welsh People, and the second 
from D r . Macalister's Secret Languages of Ireland: 
B . L . F * . S. N . B . L . F . S. N . 
H . D . T . c. Q. H . D . T . C . Q. 
M. G . N G . F F f . R . M. G . N G . Z . R . 
[* pronounced V] [f pronounced F] 
It will be seen that both these alphabets are 'Q-Cel t ' , or Goidelic, because 
they contain a Q but no P; Goidels from the Continent were established 
in South-Eastern Britain two hundred years before the Belgic (P-Cel t ) 
invasions from Gaul in the early fourth century B.C.; and it is thought 
that the common language of Bronze A g e Britain was an early form of 
Goidelic, as it was in Ireland. The Ogham alphabet quoted in the Oxford 
English Dictionary (as if it were the only one in existence) differs from 
both the Rhys and Macalister Oghams by having M . G . Y . Z . R . as its last 
line of consonants: but the Y is doubtless an error for N Y , another w a y 
of spelling the Gn as in Catalogne. In still another version, quoted in 
Charles Squire's Mythology of the British Isles, the fourteenth letter is 
given as ST and an X sign is offered for P. 
D r . Macalister proves that in Ireland Oghams were not used in public 
inscriptions until Druidism began to decline: they had been kept a dark 
secret and when used for written messages between one Druid and an-
other, nicked on wooden billets, were usually cyphered. The four sets, 
each of five characters, he suggests, represented fingers used in a sign 
language: to form any one of the letters of the alphabet, one needed only 
to extend the appropriate amount of fingers of one hand, pointing them 
in one of four different directions. But this would have been a clumsy 
method of signalling. A much quicker, less conspicuous and less fatiguing 
method would have been to regard the left hand as a key-board, like that 
of a typewriter, with the letters marked by the tips, the two middle joints, 
and the bases of the fingers and thumb, and to touch the required spots 
with the forefinger of the right hand. Each letter in the inscriptions con-
sists of nicks, from one to five in number, cut with a chisel along the edge 
of a squared stone; there are four different varieties of nick, which makes 
twenty letters. I assume that the number of nicks in a letter indicated the 
number of the digit, counting from left to right, on which the letter 
occurred in the finger language, while the variety of nick indicated the 
position of the letter on the digit. There were other methods of using the 
alphabet for secret signalling purposes. The Book of BaUymou refers toCos-ogham ( ' leg-ogham') in which the signaller, while seated, used his 
fingers to imitate inscriptional Ogham with his shin bone serving as the 
edge against which the nicks were cut. In Sron-ogham ( 'nose-ogham') the 
nose was used in much the same way. These alternative methods were 
useful for signalling across a room; the key-board method for closer 
work. Gwion is evidently referring to Sron-ogham when he mentions, 
among all the other things he knows, 'why the nose is ridged'; the answer 
is 'to make ogham-signalling easier'. 
This is the inscriptional form of the alphabet as given by Macalisten 
• .1 • Illl 1 " 111 "" ""' / / / # # ! II 1 II I 
B L F S N H O T C Q M G N G Z R A O U E I 
Besides these twenty letters, five combinations of vowels were used in the 
deaf-and-dumb language to represent five foreign sounds. These were: 
Ea Oi la Ui A e 
which represented respectively: 
K h T h P Ph X 
In inscriptions these letters were given elaborate characters entirely 
different from the other letters. Kh had a St. Andrew's cross, Th had a 
lozenge, P a piece of lattice work, Ph a spiral, and X a portcullis. 
1 1 4 
I take this to 
have been the finger 
key-board, with the 
vowels convenient-
ly grouped in the 
centre: 
Julius Caesar records in his Gallic War that the Druids of Gaul used 
'Greek letters' for their public records and private correspondence but did 
not consign their sacred doctrine to writing 'lest it should become 
vulgarized and lest, also, the memory of scholars should become im-
paired.' Dr . Macalister suggests that the Ogham alphabet, when complete 
with the extra letters, corresponds fairly closely with an early, still some-
what Semitic, form of the Greek alphabet, known as the Formello-
Cervetri which is scratched on two vases, one from Caere and the other 
from Veii in Italy, dated about the fifth century B.C. The letters are 
written Semitically from right to left and begin with A . B . G . D . E . He 
assumes that the 'Greek letters' used by the Druids were this alphabet of 
twenty-six letters, four more than the Classical Greek, though they dis-
carded one as unnecessary; and I think that he has proved his case. 
But did the Druids invent their finger-language before they learned this 
Greek alphabet? D r . Macalister thinks that they did not, and I should 
agree with him but for two main considerations, ( i ) The order of letters 
in the Ogham is altogether different from the Greek: one would have 
expected the Druids to follow the original order closely if this was their 
first experience of alphabetic spelling. (2) If the five foreign letters were 
an original part of the Ogham alphabet why were they not integrated 
with the rest in its inscriptional form? It would have been simple to allot 
them nicks as follows: 
And w h y in the finger-alphabet were they not spelt out with the nearest 
equivalent combinations of consonants—CH for K h , CS for X, and so on 
—instead of being expressed allusively in vowel combinations? 
That the vowel combinations are allusive is easily understood from the 
finger diagram above. In order to express the Kh sound of the Greek 
letter chi, the Druids used the Latin combination of C and H, but ex-
pressed this allusively as Ea , by reference to the fourth finger, the E digit, 
on which the letter C occurs, and to the thumb, the A digit, on which the 
letter H occurs. Similarly for X, pronounced ' C S ' , they used the E digit, 
on which both C and S occur, but introduced this with the A digit on 
which H occurs; H being a silent and merely ancillary letter in Celtic 
languages, and its use here being merely to form a two-vowel combina-
tion of A and E. Th is written Oi and Ph is written Ui because Th is a 
shrill variety of D (as theos in Greek corresponds with the Latin deus 
' god ' ) , and because Ph is a shrill variety of F (as phegos in Greek corres-
ponds with the Latin fagus 'beech-tree'). D occurs on the O digit and F 
on the U digit; so to differentiate Th from D and Ph from F, the I is made 
the combination vowel of O in one case and U in the other—I in Irish 
being used as an indication of shrillness of sound. Finally P is written la , 
because B which was originally pronounced P in the Celtic languages (the 
Welsh still habitually confound the two sounds), occurs on the A digit; 
the I is an indication that P is distinguished from B in foreign languages. 
I conclude that the twenty letters of the Ogham alphabet were in 
existence long before the Formello-Cervetri alphabet was brought to 
Italy from Greece and that the Gallic Druids added the five foreign letters 
to them with such disdain as virtually to deny them any part in the system. 
What complicates the case is that the ancient Irish word for 'alphabet' is 
'Beth-Luis-Nion' which suggests that the order of letters in the Ogham 
alphabet was originally B . L . N . , though it had become B . L . F . before the 
ban on inscriptions was lifted. Besides, the accepted Irish tradition was that 
the alphabet originated in Greece, not Phoenicia, and was brought to 
Ireland by way of Spain, not Gaul. Spenser records this in his View of the 
Present State of Ireland (1596): 'it seemeth that they had them [the letters] 
from the nation that came out of Spaine.' 
The names of the letters of the B . L . F . alphabet are given by Roderick 
O'Flaherty in his seventeenth-century Ogygia, on the authority of Duald 
Mac Firbis, a family bard of the O'Briens who had access to the o i l 
records, as follows: 
B B O I B E L M M O I R I A 
L L O T H G G A T H 
F [ V ] F O R A N N N g N G O I M A R 
N N E I A G A D O N Y I D R A 
1 1 6 
s S A L I A R R I U B E N 
H U I R I A A A C A B 
D D A I B H A I T H ( D A V I D ) O O S E 
T T E I L M O N U U R A 
C C A O I E E S U 
C C C A I L E P I J A I C f f l M 
When recently I wrote on this subject to D r . Macalister, as the best living 
authority on Oghams, he replied that I must not take O'Flaherty's alpha-
bets seriously: 'They all seem to me to be late artificialities, or rather 
pedantries, of little more importance than the affectations of Sir Piercie 
Shafton and his kind.' I pass on this caution in all fairness, for my argu-
ment depends on O'Flaherty's alphabet, and D r . Macalister's is a very 
broad back for anyone to shelter behind who thinks that I am writing 
nonsense. But the argument of this book began with the assumption that 
Gwion was concealing an alphabetic secret in his riddling poem. And the 
answers to the riddles if I have not got them wrong—though 'Morvran' 
and 'Moiria', 'Ne-esthan' and 'Neiagadon', 'Rhea ' and 'Riuben' do not 
seem to match very well—approximate so closely to the 'Boibel Loth ' 
that I feel justified in supposing that O'Flaherty was recording a genuine 
tradition at least as old as the thirteenth century A . D . and that the answers 
to the so-far unsolved riddles will be found in the Boibel-Loth letter-
names not yet accounted for. 
We can begin our secondary process of unravelling Gwion 's riddles by 
putting Idris at place 14 as an equivalent of Idra; and removing the J from 
Jose (Joseph) and Jesu (Jesus), neither of which names—as Gwion the 
Hebrew scholar may have known—originally began with J; and trans-
posing Uriel and Hur—for the mediaeval Irish had long lost their 
aspirated H, so that Hur and Uria easily got confused. Then if the 
answers to our unsolved riddles are to be found in the unused letters of 
the Boibel-Loth, this leaves us with A C A B and J A I C H I M ; and with five 
unsolved riddles: 
I have been at the throne of the Distributor, 
I was loquacious before I was gifted with speech; 
I am Alpha Tetragrammaton. 
I am a wonder whose origin is not known— 
I shall be until the day of doom upon the earth. 
'Moiria', the Boibel-Loth equivalent of 'Morvran ' , suggests 'Moreh', or 
"Moriah', at both of which places Jehovah, in Genesis, makes a covenantwith Abraham and allots a dominion to him and to his seed for ever. 
Another name for Moriah is Mount Zion, and in Isaiah, XVIII Mount 
1 1 7 
Zion is mentioned as the Throne of the Lord of Hosts who 'scatters, 
distributes and treads underfoot*. 'Moiria' also suggests the Greek word 
moira, a share, lot or distribution. If 'Moriah' is the answer to the first of 
these five unsolved riddles, it must be linked with 'I have been bard of the 
harp to Deon of Lochlyn ' ; and we must credit the scholarly Gwion with 
interpreting the word as meaning Mor-Iah, or Mor-Jah, 'the god of the 
sea', the word 'Mor ' being the Welsh equivalent of the Hebrew 'Marah' 
(the salt sea). He is in fact identifying Jah, the Hebrew G o d , with Bran 
who was a grain-god as well as a god of the alder. The identification is 
justified. One of the early gods worshipped at Jerusalem and later in-
cluded in the synthetic cult of Jehovah was the harvest god Tammuz for 
whom first-fruits of grain were yearly brought from Bethlehem ('the 
house of bread'). The natives of Jerusalem were stili wailing for him at 
the Feast of Unleavened Bread in Isaiah's day and according to Jerome he 
had a sacred grove at Bethlehem. It will be remembered that the Temple 
was built on the 'threshing floor of Araunah', which sounds uncannily 
like Arawn. Moreover, Bran's crow was equally sacred to Jehovah. Still 
more conclusive is Jehovah's claim to the seventh day as sacred to himself. 
In the contemporary astrological system the week was divided between 
the sun, moon and seven planets, and the Sabians of Harran in Meso-
potamia, who were of Aegean origin, put the days under the rule of seven 
deities, in the order still current in Europe: Sun, Moon, Nergal (Mars), 
Nabu (Mercury), Bel (Juppiter), Beltis (Venus), Cronos (Saturn). Thus 
Jehovah, the god whose holiest day is Saturday, must be identified with 
Cronos or Saturn, who is Bran. We should credit Gwion with under-
standing this, and also with knowing that Uriel and Uriah are the same 
word, El and Jah being interchangeable names of the Hebrew G o d . 
The divine name of Alpha written in four letters turns out to be 'Acab ' 
in O'Flaherty's list of letter-names; which suggests Achab (Ahab) King 
of Israel, a name borne also by the prophet who appears in the Acts of the 
Apostles as 'Agabus*. It is the name 'Agabus ' which explains the secondary 
riddle 'I have been loquacious before I was gifted with speech', for 
Agabus (who according to the pseudo-Dorotheus was one of the Seventy 
Disciples) is mentioned twice in the Acts of the Apostles. In the first men-
tion (Acts XI) he signified by the Spirit that there would be a famine. 
Gwion pretends to understand from signified that Agabus made signs, 
prophesied in dumb show, on that occasion, whereas in Acts XXI he 
spoke aloud with: 'Thus saith the Holy Ghost. ' But Achab is not a divine 
name: in Hebrew it means merely 'Father's brother'. However , Acab is the 
Hebrew word for 'locust', and the golden locust was among the Greeks of 
Asia Minor a divine emblem of Apol lo , the Sun-god. 1 Gwion in another of 
1 Perhaps originally an emblem of destruction borrowed from the Moon-goddess to whom, 
as we know from the Biblical stories of Rahab and Tamar, the scarlet thread was sacred; for 
1 1 8 
the poems in the Romance, called Divregwawd Taliesin, styles Jesus 'Son 
of Alpha' . Since Acab is the equivalent in this alphabet of Alpha in the 
Greek, this is to make Jesus the son of Acab; and, since Jesus was the Son 
of God , to make Acab a synonym of G o d . 
As for 'Jaichim', or 'Jachin', that was the name of one of the two 
mysterious pillars of Solomon's Temple, the other being 'Boaz ' . (The 
rabbis taught that Boaz meant 'In it strength', that Jachim (yikkori) 
meant 'He shall establish', and that they represented respectively the sun 
and the moon. The Freemasons seem to have borrowed this tradition.) 
H o w it happened that Solomon raised two pillars, one on each side of the 
facade of the Temple, called 'Boaz ' (a word which is supposed by Hebrew 
scholars to have once had an L in the middle of it) and 'Jachin'—is a 
question that need not concern us yet. Al l we must notice is that Jaichim 
is the last letter of this alphabet, and that I in Celtic mythology is the 
letter of death and associated with the yew tree. Thus Jaichim is a synonym 
for Death—Euripides in his Frantic Hercules used the same word, 
iachema, to mean the deadly hissing of a serpent—and how Death came 
into the world, and what comes after Death, have always been the grand 
subjects of religious and philosophical dispute. Death will always remain 
upon the Earth, according to Christian dogma, until the D a y of Doom. 
Here, then, is Taliesin's grand conundrum, taken to pieces and re-
assembled in orderly form, with the answer attached to each riddle: 
I was the tower of the work of which Nimrod was overseer. Babel. 
I saw the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Lota. 
I was at the Court of D o n before the birth of Gwydion; my head 
was at the White Hill in the Hall of Cymbeline; and it is not known 
whether my body is flesh or fish. Vran. 
I stood with Mary Magdalene at the place of Crucifixion of the 
Merciful Son of God . Salome. 
I was the banner carried before Alexander. Ne-esthan. 
I strengthened Moses in the land of the Deity. HUT. 
I was in Canaan when Absalom was slain; I am winged with the 
genius of the splendid crozier. David. 
A primary chief bard am I to Elphin who was in stocks and fetters for 
a year and a day. At first I was little Gwion and obtained my inspiration 
from the cauldron of the hag Cerridwen. Then for nine months almost I 
was in Cerridwen's belly. At length I became Taliesin. 'Joannes' I was 
three locusts and a scarlet thread are mentioned in the Ethiopian Kebra Nagast as the magical 
properties with which the Daughter of Pharoah seduced King Solomon. The myth of 
Tithonus and Aurora is likely to be derived from a mistaken reading of a sacred picture in 
which the Moon-goddess is shown hand in hand with Adonis, beside a rising sun as emblem 
ofhisyouth, and a locust as emblem of the destruction that awaits him. 
1 1 9 
called, and Merlin the Diviner, and Elias, but at length every King shall 
call me Taliesin. I am able to instruct the whole Universe. Taliesin. 
First I was with my Lord in the Highest Sphere and then I was in his 
buttery. Kai. 
I conveyed the Divine Spirit across Jordan to the level of the Vale 
of Hebron. Caleb. 
I was the Throne of the Distributor; I was minstrel to the Danes of 
Lochlin. Moriah. 
I was fostered in the Ark and have been teacher to all intelligences. 
Hu Gadarn. 
Once I was in India and Asia. I have now come here to the remnant 
of T roy . Gomer. 
I have sat in an uneasy chair; I know the names of the stars from 
North to South; my original country is the land of the Cherubim, the 
region of the summer stars. Idris. 
I was in the firmament on the Galaxy when Rome was built, and 
whirled around motionless between three elements. Rhea. 
I was loquacious before I was given speech; I am Alpha Tetragram-
maton. Acab. 
I was with my King in the manger of the Ass . Jose. 
On the fall of Lucifer to the lowest depth of Hell, I was instructor to 
Enoch and Noah; I was on the horse's crupper of Enoch and Elias. I 
was also at Caer Bedion. Uriel. 
I suffered hunger with the Son of the Virgin; I was on the High 
Cross in the land of the Trinity; I was three periods in the Castle of 
Arianrhod, above the Castle of the Sidhe. Jesus. 
I am a wonder whose origin is not known. I shall remain until the 
D a y of D o o m upon the face of the earth. Jachin. 
So it seems that the answer to the conundrum is a bardic alphabet, 
closely resembling O'Flaherty's, but with Morvran for Moiria, Ne-esthan 
for Neiagadon, Rhea for Riuben, Salome for Salia,1 Gadam for Gath, Uriel 
for Uria, and Taliesin forTeilmon. 
This may seem an anticlimax. Beyond establishing that the Boibel-
Loth is at any rate as old as the thirteenth-century Red Book of 
Hergest in which the Hanes Taliesin occurs, and not a mere pedantry or 
artificiality of O'Flaherty's , what has been learned? 
Well: by the time that O'Flaherty published the alphabet, the secret of 
its meaning had evidendy been lost and there seemed to be no reason for 
further concealment of the letter-names. It had indeed been published long 
before in a tenth-century bardic primer. But we may be sure that Gwion 
with his D o g , Roebuck and Lapwing would never have gone to such 
11 find that the manuscript version of the Hearings of the Scholars in the Advocates' 
Library, Edinburgh, gives Salamon as the name of this letter. 
120 
extravagant lengths in confusing the elements of their conundrum unless 
the answer had been something really secret, something of immensely 
greater importance than a mere A . B . C . But the only hope of getting any 
further in the chase lies in discovering what meaning the letters of the 
alphabet have apart from the proper names which are attached to them in 
the riddle. Do they perhaps spell out a secret religious formula? 
* * * 
Since solving this grand conundrum I realize that I misread the riddle: 
'I was chief overseer of the work of the Tower of Nimrod' , though I gave 
the correct answer. It refers to a passage in The Hearings of the Scholars, 
where' The Work of the Tower of Nimrod' is explained as the linguistic 
researches carried on there (see Chapter Thirteen) by Feniusa Farsa and 
his seventy-two assistants. The tower is said to have been built of nine 
different materials: 
Clay, water, wool and blood 
Wood, lime, andflax-thread a full twist, 
Acacia, bitumen with virtue— 
The nine materials of Nimrod's Tower. 
and these nine materials are poetically explained as: 
Noun, pronoun, [adjective], verb, 
Adverb, participle, [preposition], 
Conjunction, interjection. 
The twenty-five noblest of the seventy-two assistants who worked on 
the language are said to have given their names to the Ogham letters. 
The names are as follows: 
B A B E L M U R I A T H 
L O T H G O T L I 
F O R A I N D G O M E R S 
S A L I A T H S T R U 
N A B G A D O N R U B E N 
H I R U A D A C H A B 
D A B H I D O I S E 
T A L A M O N U R I T H 
C A E E S S U 
K A L I A P I A C H I M 
E T H R O C I U S , U I M E L I C U S , I U D O N I U S , A F F R I M , O R D I N E S . 
It will be noticed that the list is a somewhat degenerate one, with Hiruad 
(Herod) for Hur, and Nabgadon (Nebuchadnezzar) for Ne-esthan. T h e 
five last names represent the 'foreign letters' absent from the original 
canon. The 'chief overseer' of the riddle is not, as one would suspect, 
Feniusa Farsa, nor either of his two leading assistants, Gadel and Caoith, 
121 
but Babel; for it is explained in the same section of the book that Babel 
is the letter B, that the Birch is its tree and that 'on a switch of Birch was 
written the first Ogham inscription made in Ireland, namely seven B ' s , as 
a warning to L u g son of Ethliu, to wit, " T h y wife will be seven times 
carried away from thee into fairyland, or elsewhere, unless birch be her 
overseer. '" L u g realized that the seven B's represented birch seven times 
repeated but, to make sense of the message, he had to convert the seven 
B 's , represented by single nicks, into two other letters of the same flight, 
namely S and F (four nicks and three nicks) the initials of the operative 
Irish words sid and feraruL 
This riddle is conclusive proof, if any doubt remains, of Gwion 's 
acquaintance with contemporary Irish bardic lore. 
122 
Chapter Eight 
HERCULES ON THE LOTUS 
To sum up the historical argument. 'Gwion ' , a North Welsh cleric of the late thirteenth century, whose true name is not known but who championed the popular 
minstrels against the Court bards, wrote (or rewrote) a romance about a 
miraculous Child who possessed a secret doctrine that nobody could 
guess; this doctrine is incorporated in a series of mystical poems which 
belong to the romance. The romance is based on a more primitive original, 
of the ninth century A . D . , in which Creirwy and Afagddu, the children of 
Tegid Voel and Caridwen, probably played a more important part than in 
Gwion 's version. (This original has been lost though, strangely enough, 
the same dramatis personae occur in Shakespeare's Tempest: Prospero, 
who like Tegid Voel lived on a magic island; the black screaming hag 
Sycorax. 'Pig Raven ' , mother of Caliban the ugliest man alive; Prospero's 
daughter Miranda the most beautiful woman, whom Caliban tries to rape; 
Ariel the miraculous Child whom Sycorax imprisons. Perhaps Shake-
speare heard the story from his Welsh schoolmaster at Stratford, the 
original of Sir Hugh Evans in The Merry Wives of Windsor.) 
The miraculous Child set a riddle, based on a knowledge not only of 
British and Irish mythology, but of the Greek New Testament and 
Septuagint, the Hebrew Scriptures and Apocrypha, and Latin and Greek 
mythology. The answer to the riddle is a list of names which correspond 
closely with a list that Roderick O'Flaherty, the seventeenth-century 
confidant of the learned Irish antiquary Duald Mac Firbis, claimed to be 
the original letter-names of the Ogham alphabet, whicn is found in 
numerous inscriptions in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England and the Isle 
of Man, some of them pre-Christian. Its invention is ascribed by Irish 
tradition to the Goidelic god Ogma Sun-Face, who according to the 
account given by Lucian of Samosata, who wrote in the second century 
A . D . , was representee, in Celtic art as a mixture of the gods Cronos, 
Hercules and Apol lo . A connexion between the Ogham found in inscrip-
tions and a fifth-century B.C. Greek alphabet from Etruria, the Formello-
Cervetri, has been proved; nevertheless there is evidence that an earlier 
form of Ogham, with a slightly different order of letters, was current in 
Ireland before the Druids of Gaul came into contact with the Formello-
Cervetri alphabet. It may also have been current in Britain where, accord-
ing to Julius Caesar, the Druids of Gaul went for their university training 
in secret doctrine. 
I first suspected that an alphabet was contained in Gwion 's conundrum 
when I began to restore the purposely jumbled text of his Battle of the 
Trees, which refers to a primitive British tradition of the capture of an 
oracular shrine by the guessing of a god's name. This capture seems to 
have taken place early in the fourth century B.C. when the Belgic Brythons, 
worshippers of the Ash-god Gwydion , with the help of an agricultural 
tribe already settled in Britain, seized the national shrine, perhaps A v e -
bury, from the reigning priesthood, two of whose gods were Arawn and 
Bran. Bran is the Celtic name for the ancient Crow-god , variously known 
as Apollo, Saturn, Cronos and Aesculapius, who was also a god of healing 
and whose worship had been combined with that of a Thunder-god, 
pictured as a ram or bull, known variously as Zeus, Tantalus, Juppiter, 
Telamon and Hercules. The letter names of Gwion 's alphabet apparently 
conceal the Name of the transcendent God , whom Caesar calls Dis , 
worshipped in Britain and Gaul. It may be inferred that the earlier alpha-
bet, containing a pre-Belgic religious secret, had a different series of letter-
names from those contained in Gwion 's conundrum, that the alphabetical 
order began with B . L . N . , not B . L . F . , and that after the capture of the 
shrine the Divine Name was altered. 
It now remains to be discovered: 
(1 ) What the letter-names in Gwion 's alphabet, the Boibel-Loth, 
meant. 
(2) What Divine Name was concealed in them. 
(3) What were the original names of the letters in the tree-alphabet, 
the Beth-Luis-Nion. 
(4) What they meant. 
(5) WhatDivine Name was concealed in them. 
Gwion gives us the first point in our renewed chase of the Roebuck by 
introducing into his Romance an Elegy on Hercules, which I will quote 
presendy; but 'Hercules' is a word of very many meanings. Cicero 
distinguishes six different legendary figures named Hercules; Var ro , 
forty-four. His name, in Greek Heracles, means 'G lo ry of Hera' , and 
Hera was an early Greek name for the Death-goddess w h o had charge of 
the souls of sacred kings and made oracular heroes of them. He is, in fact, 
a composite deity consisting of a great many oracular heroes of different 
nations at different stages of religious development; some of whom be-
came real gods while some remained heroes. This makes him the most per-
plexing character in Classical mythology; for the semi-historical Pelopid 
124 
prince of the generation before the Trojan War has been confused with 
various heroes and deities called Hercules, and these with one another. 
Hercules first appears in legend as a pastoral sacred king and, perhaps 
because shepherds welcome the birth of twin lambs, is a twin himself. His 
characteristics and history can be deduced from a mass of legends, folk-
customs and megalithic monuments. He is the rain-maker of his tribe and 
a sort of human thunder-storm. Legends connect him with Libya and the 
Atlas Mountains; he may well have originated thereabouts in Palaeolithic 
times. The priests of Egyptian Thebes, who called him 'Shu' , dated his 
origin as '17,000 years before the reign of King Amasis ' . He carries an oak-
club, because the oak provides his beasts and his people with mast and 
because it attracts lightning more than any other tree. His symbols are 
the acorn; the rock-dove, which nests in oaks as well as in clefts of rock; 
the mistletoe, or loranthus: and the serpent. All these are sexual emblems. 
The dove was sacred to the Love-goddess of Greece and Syria; the serpent 
was the most ancient of phallic totem-beasts; the cupped acorn stood for the 
glans penis in both Greek and Latin; the mistletoe was an all-heal and its 
names viscus (Latin) and ixias (Greek) are connected with vis and ischus 
(strength)—probably because of the spermal viscosity of its berries, 
sperm being the vehicle of life. This Hercules is male leader of all orgi-
astic rites and has twelve archer companions, including his spear-armed 
twin, who is his tanist or deputy. He performs an annual green-wood 
marriage with a queen of the woods, a sort of Maid Marian. He is a mighty 
hunter and makes rain, when it is needed, by rattling an oak-club thunder-
ously in a hollow oak and stirring a pool with an oak branch—alterna-
tively, by rattling pebbles inside a sacred colocinth-gourd or, later, by 
rolling black meteoric stones inside a wooden chest—and so attracting 
thunderstorms by sympathetic magic. 
The manner of his death can be reconstructed from a variety of legends, 
folk customs and other religious survivals. At mid-summer, at the end of a 
half-year reign, Hercules is made drunk with mead and led into the middle 
of a circle of twelve stones arranged around an oak, in front of which stands 
an altar-stone; the oak has been lopped until it is T-shaped. He is bound 
to it with willow thongs in the 'five-fold bond' which joins wrists, neck 
and ankles together, beaten by his comrades till he faints, then flayed, 
blinded, castrated, impaled with a mistletoe stake, and finally hacked into 
joints on the altar-stone. 1 His blood is caught in a basin and used for 
sprinkling the whole tribe to make them vigorous and fruitful. The joints 
are roasted at twin fires of oak-loppings, kindled with sacred fire pre-
1 The five-fold bond was reported from China by the Arab merchant Suleyman in 851 A . D . 
He writes that 'when the man condemned to death has been trussed up in this fashion, and 
beaten with a fixed number of blows, his body, still faintly breathing, is given over to those 
who must devour it*. 
" 5 
served from a lightning-blasted oak or made by twirling an alder- or 
cornel-wood fire-drill in an oak log. The trunk is then uprooted and split 
into faggots which are added to the flames. The twelve merry-men rush 
in a wild figure-of-eight dance around the fires, singing ecstatically and 
tearing at the flesh with their teeth. The bloody remains are burnt in the 
fire, all except the genitals and the head. These are put into an alder-wood 
boat and floated down a river to an islet; though the head is sometimes 
cured with smoke and preserved for oracular use. His tanist succeeds him 
and reigns for the remainder of the year, when he is sacrificially killed 
by a new Hercules. 
To this type of Hercules belong such diverse characters as Hercules of 
Oeta, Orion the Hunter of Crete, Polyphemus the Cyclops, Samson the 
Danite, Cuchulain of Muirthemne the Irish Sun-hero, Ixion the Lapi th— 
who is always depicted stretched in a 'five-fold bond* around a Sun-
wheel—Agag the Amalekite, Romulus of Rome, Zeus, Janus, Anchises, 
The Dagda and Hermes. This Hercules is the leader of his people in war 
and hunting and his twelve chieftains are pledged to respect his authority; 
but his name commemorates his subservience to the Goddess, the Queen 
of the Woods, whose priestess is the tribal law-giver and disposer of all 
the amenities of life. The health of the people is bound up with his and he 
is burdened with numerous royal taboos. 
In the Classical myth which authorizes his sovereignty he is a mira-
culous child born in a shower of gold; strangles a serpent in his cradle, 
which is also a boat, and is credited (like Zeus) with causing the spurt of 
milk that made the Milky Way; as a young man he is the undefeated 
monster-slayer of his age; kills and dismembers a monstrous boar; begets 
countless sons but no daughters—title is still, in fact, matrilinearly con-
veyed; willingly undertakes the world-burden of the giant Atlas; does 
wonderful feats with his oak-club and his arrows; masters the wild horse 
Arion and brings up the D o g Cerberus from the Underworld; is betrayed 
by his lovely bride; flays himself by tearing off his poisoned shirt; climbs 
in agony to the top of Mount Oeta; fells and splits an oak for his own pyre; 
is consumed; flies up to heaven on the smoke of the pyre in the form of an 
eagle, and is introduced by the Goddess of Wisdom into the company of 
the Immortals. 
T h e divine names Bran, Saturn, Cronos must also be referred to this 
primitive religious system. T h e y are applied to the ghost of Hercules that 
floats off in the alder-wood boat after his midsummer sacrifice. His tanist, 
or other self, appearing in Greek legend as Poeas who lighted Hercules' 
pyre and inherited his arrows, succeeds him for the second half of the 
year; having acquired royal virtue by marriage with the queen, the repre-
sentative of the White Goddess, and by eating some royal part of the dead 
man's body—heart, shoulder or thigh-flesh. He is in turn succeeded by 
126 
the N e w Year Hercules, a reincarnation of the murdered man, who be-
heads him and, apparently, eats his head. This alternate eucharistic sacri-
fice made royalty continuous, each king being in turn the Sun-god beloved 
of the reigning Moon-goddess. 
But when these cannibalistic rites were abandoned and the system was 
gradually modified until a single king reigned for a term of years, Saturn-
Cronos-Bran became a mere Old Year ghost, permanently overthrown by 
Juppiter-Zeus-Belin though yearly conjured up for placation at the Satur-
nalia or Yule feast. Here at last we can guess the political motive behind 
Amathaon's betrayal of his cousin Bran's name at the Battle of the Trees 
for the benefit of his friend Gwydion: did the Bronze A g e Amathaonians, 
who worshipped the Immortal Beli in his Stonehenge temple, find that 
they had less in common with their White-Goddess-worshipping over-
lords thanwith the invading Iron A g e Belgic tribes whose god Odin 
(Gwydion) had emancipated himself from the tutelage of the White G o d -
dess Freya? Once the Bran priesthood was banished from Salisbury Plain 
and driven up North, they would be free to institute a permanent kingship 
over all Southern Britain under the patronage of Belin; and this is exactly 
what they seem to have done, after an amicable arrangement with the 
priesthood of Odin, to whom they gave the control of the national oracle 
as a reward for their help in the battle. 
The next type of Hercules is an agricultural as well as a pastoral king 
and specializes in the cultivation of barley, so that he is sometimes confused 
with Eleusinian Triptolemus, Syrian Tammuz or Egyptian Maneros. 
Early portraits of him, with lion skin, club and grain sprouting from his 
shoulders, have been found in Mesopotamian cities of the third millennium 
B.C. In the Eastern Mediterranean he reigns alternatively with his twin, as 
in the double kingdoms of Argos , Lacedaemon, Corinth, Alba Longa, 
and Rome. Co-kings of this type are Iphiclus, twin to Tirynthian 
Hercules; Pollux, twin to Castor; Lynceus, twin to Idas; Calais, twin to 
Zetes; Remus, twin to Romulus; Demophoon, twin to Triptolemus; the 
Edomite Perez, twin to Zarah; Abel, twin to Cain; and many more. 
Hercules is now lover to fifty water-priestesses of the Mountain-goddess 
in whose honour he wears a lion's skin. The twins' joint reign is fixed at 
eight years, apparently because at every hundredth lunar month occurs a 
rough approximation of lunar and solar times. Llew Llaw Gyffes ('the 
Lion with the Steady Hand') is true to type when in the Romance of Math 
the Son of Mathonwy he takes Gwydion as his twin to visit his mother 
Arianrhod. For each year that the reign of this agricultural Hercules is 
prolonged he offers a child-victim in his stead; which explains the Greek 
legends of Hercules killing children by accident or in a fit of madness, and 
the destruction by fire, after a temporary investiture as king, of various un-
fortunate young princes, among them Gwern , nephew of Bran; Phaethon, 
127 
son of Helios; Icarus, son of Daedalus, who flew too near the sun; 
Demophoon, son of Celeus of Eleusis, whom Demeter was trying to im-
mortalize; and Dionysus son of Cretan Zeus. It also explains the child-
sacrifices of Phoenicia, including those offered to Jehovah Melkarth in 
the Valley of Hinnom (or Gehenna) the home of the undying serpent, 
where the sacrificial fire was never quenched. 
The custom of burning a child to death as an annual surrogate for the 
sacred king is well illustrated in the myth of Theds , Peleus and Achilles. 
Peleus was an Achaean fratricide in exile from Aegina and became King of 
Iolcus with a co-king Acastus, in succession to the co-kings Pelias and 
Neleus. Thetis, a Thessalian Sea goddess is described by the mytho-
graphers either as a daughter of Cheiron the Centaur, or as one of the 
fifty Nereids, from whom she was chosen to be a wife to Zeus. Zeus 
changed his mind because of an oracle and gave her in marriage to Peleus, 
to whom she bore seven children, six of whom she burned to death. T h e 
seventh, Achilles, was rescued by Peleus in the nick of time—like the in-
fant Aesculapius. The first six had been given immortality by the burning 
process; with Achilles the process had not yet been completed—his heel 
was still vulnerable. Thetis fled and Peleus gave Achilles into the custody 
of Cheiron who tutored him; later Achilles ruled over the Myrmidons of 
Pthiotis and brought a contingent of them to fight at T r o y . When offered 
the choice of a brief but glorious life or a long and undistinguished one, he 
chose the brief one. 
The myth has kept its main oudines pretty well despite the inability of 
later editors to understand the system of matrilinear succession. There 
was a shrine of the Moon-goddess Artemis, alias Nereis, or Thetis, at 
Iolcus, the chief port of Southern Thessaly, with an attached college of 
fifty priestesses. This Artemis was a patroness of fishermen and sailors. 
One of the priestesses was chosen every fiftieth month as representative of 
the Goddess; perhaps she was the winner of a race. She took a yearly con-
sort who became the Oak-king, or Zeus, of the region and was sacrificed 
at the close of his term of office. By the time that the Achaeans had estab-
lished the Olympian religion in Thessaly (it is recorded that all the gods 
and goddesses attended Peleus's marriage to Thetis) the term had been ex-
tended to eight, or perhaps seven, years, and a child sacrificed every 
winter solstice until the term was complete. (Seven years instead of the 
Great Year of eight seems to be a blunder of the mythographers; but from 
the Scottish witch-ballad of True Thomas it appears that seven years was 
the normal term for the Queen of Elphame's consort to reign, and the 
Scottish witch cult had close affinities with primitive Thessalian reli-
gion.) 
Achilles, the lucky seventh (or perhaps eighth) child w h o was saved 
because Peleus himself had to die, was apparendy one of the Centaurs of 
128 
near-by Pelion with whom the Nereids of Iolcus had ancient exogamic 
ties and from whom Peleus would naturally choose his child victims— 
they would not be his own sons by Thetis. When Achilles grew up he be-
came king of the Myrmidons of Pthiotis: presumably by marriage with the 
tribal representative of the Goddess. He can hardly have inherited the title 
from Peleus. (Myrmidon means 'ant', so it is likely that the wryneck, 
which feeds on ants and nests in willow-trees, sacred to the Goddess, was 
the local totem-bird; Philyra, Cheiron's mother, is traditionally associated 
with the wryneck.) It is established that there was an Achilles cult in 
Greece before the Trojan War was fought, so the brief but glorious life 
was probably that of a stay-at-home king with a sacred heel who won 
immortality at death by becoming an oracular hero. Thetis was credited 
with the power to change her appearance; she was, in fact, served by 
various colleges oi priestesses each with a different totem beast or bird— 
mare, she-bear, crane, fish, wryneck and so on. 
The same myth has been twisted in a variety of ways. In some versions 
the emphasis is on the mock-marriage, which was an integral part of the 
coronation. The Arg ive myth of the fifty Danaids who were married to 
the fifty sons of Aegyptus and killed all but one on their common wedding 
night, and the Perso-Egypto-Greek myth of Tobi t and Raguel 's daughter 
whose seven previous husbands had all been killed by the demon A s m o -
deus—in Persian, Aeshma Daeva—on their wedding night, are originally 
identical. 
The various contradictory versions of the Danaid myth help us to 
understand the ritual from which it originated. Pindar in his Fourth 
Pythian Ode says that the brides were pardoned, purified by Hermes and 
Athene and offered as prizes to the victors of public games. Later authori-
ties, such as Ovid and Horace, say that they were not pardoned but con-
demned everlastingly to pour water into a vessel full of holes. Herodotus 
says that they brought the mysteries of Demeter to Argos and taught 
them to the Pelasgian women. Others say that four of them were wor -
shipped at Argos because they provided the city with water. The real 
story seems to be that the Danaids were an Arg ive college of fifty priest-
esses of the Barley-goddess Danae, who was interested in giving rain to 
the crops and was worshipped under four different divine titles; pouring 
water through a vessel with holes so that it looked like rain was their usual 
rain-bringing charm. Every four years at the fiftieth lunar month a contest 
was held as to who should become the Hercules, or Zeus, of the next four 
years and the lover of these fifty priestesses. This term was afterwards pro-
longed to eight years,with the usual yearly sacrifice of a child. Danaan 
Argos was captured by the Sons of Aegyptus who invaded the Pelopon-
nese from Syria, and many of the Danaans who resisted them were driven 
northward out of Greece; as has already been mentioned. 
129 
In the Book of Tobit, Tobit is the lucky eighth, the new Zeus bride-
groom, who escapes his fate when the reigning Zeus has to die at the end 
of his term. Asmodeus is the Persian counterpart of Set, the yearly mur-
derer of Osiris, but he is charmed away with the fish of immortality and 
flees to his southern deserts. Tobit's dog is a helpful clue; he always 
accompanied Hercules Melkarth, or his Persian counterpart Sraosha, or 
the Greek Aesculapius, wherever he went. 
A typical set of taboos binding this Hercules is quoted by Sir James 
Frazer in his Golden Bough: they were applied to the Flamen Dialis, the 
successor of the Sacred King of Rome whose war-leadership passed to the 
twin Consuls at the foundation of the Republic. 
The Flamen Dialis might not ride or even touch a horse, nor see an 
army under arms, nor wear a ring which was not broken, nor have a 
knot in any part of his garments; no fire except a sacred one might be 
taken out of his house; he might not touch wheaten flour or leavened 
bread; he might not touch or even name a goat, a dog, raw meat, beans 
and ivy; he might not walk under a vine; the feet of his bed had to be 
daubed with mud; his hair could be cut only by a free man and with a 
bronze knife; and his hair and nails when cut had to be buried under a 
lucky tree; he might not touch a dead body nor enter a place where one 
was buried; he might not see work being done on holy days; he might 
not be uncovered in the open air; if a man in bonds were taken into his 
house, the captive had to be unbound and the cords had to be drawn 
up through a hole in the roof and so let down into the street. 
Frazer should have added that the Flamen owed his position to a sacred 
marriage with the Flaminica: Plutarch records in his Roman Questions (50) 
that he could not divorce her, and had to resign his office if she died. 
In Ireland this Hercules was named Cenn Cruaich, 'the Lord of the 
Mound', but after his supersession by a more benignant sacred king was 
remembered as Cromm Cruaich ('the Bowed One of the Mound'). In a 
Christian poem occurring in the eleventh-century Book of Leinster he is 
thus described: 
Here once dwelt 
A high idol of many fights, 
The Cromm Cruaich byname, 
And deprived every tribe of peace. 
Without glory in his honour, 
They would sacrifice their wretched children 
With much lamentation and danger, 
Pouring their blood around Cromm Cruaich. 
1 3 0 
Milk and corn 
They would urgently desire of him, 
In barter for one-third oftheir healthy offspring— 
Their horror of him was great. 
To him the noble Goidels 
Wouldprostrate themselves; 
From the bloody sacrifices offered him 
The plain is called'The Plain ofAdoration . 
They did evilly, 
Beat on their palms, thumped their bodies, 
Wailing to the monster who enslaved them, 
Their tears falling in showers. 
In a rank stand 
Twelve idols of stone; 
Bitterly to enchant the people 
The figure of the Cromm was of gold. 
From the reign of Heremon, 
The noble and graceful, 
Such worshipping of stones there was 
Until the coming of good Patrick ofMacha. 
It is likely enough that this cult was introduced into Ireland in the 
reign of Heremon, the nineteenth King of All Ireland, the date of whose 
accession is traditionally given as 1267 B.C., though Dr. Joyce, a reliable 
modern authority, makes it 1015 B.C. Heremon, one of the invading 
Milesians from Spain, became sole monarch of Ireland by his victory over 
the armies of the North and put his enemies under heavy tribute. 
(The Milesians of Irish legend are said to have originated in Greece 
early in the second millennium B.C. and to have taken many generations to 
reach Ireland, after wandering about the Mediterranean. The Milesians of 
Greek legend claimed descent from Miletus, a son of Apollo, who emi-
grated from Crete to Caria in very early times, and built the city of 
Miletus; there was another city of the same name in Crete. The Irish 
Milesians similarly claimed to have visited Crete and to have gone thence 
to Syria, and thence by way of Carenia in Asia Minor to Gaetulia in North 
Africa, Baelduno or Baelo, a port near Cadiz, and Breagdun or Brigantium 
(now Compostella), in North-western Spain. Among their ancestors were 
Gadel—perhaps a deity of the river Gadylum on the southern coast of the 
Black Sea near Trebizond; 'Niulus or Neolus of Argos'; Cecrops of Athens; 
and 'Scota daughter of the king of Egypt'. 
If this account has any sense it refers to a westward migration from the 
1 3 1 
Aegean to Spain in the late thirteenth century B.C. when, as we have seen, 
a wave of Indo-Europeans from the north, among them the Dorian 
Greeks, was slowly displacing the Mycenaean 'Peoples of the Sea' from 
Greece, the Aegean Islands, and Asia Minor. 
Neleus (if this is the 'Niulus or Neolus' of the Irish legend) was a 
Minyan, an Aeolian Greek, who reigned over Pylos, a Peloponnese 
kingdom that traded extensively with the western Mediterranean. The 
Achaeans subdued him in a battle from which only his son Nestor (a 
garrulous old man at the time of the Trojan War) escaped. Neleus was 
reckoned a son of the Goddess Tyro , and she was mother also of Aeson 
the Minyan, who was rejuvenated in the Cauldron, and Amythaon— 
Amathaon again? Tyro was probably the Goddess of the Tyrrhenians 
who were expelled from Asia Minor a century or two later and sailed to 
Italy. These Tyrrhenians, usually known as Etruscans, dated their 
national existence from 967 B.C. Cecrops appears in Greek legend as the 
first Greek king of Attica and the reputed originator of barley-cake 
offerings to Zeus. Scota, who has been confused in Irish legend with the 
ancestor of the Cottians, is apparently Scotia ('The Dark One'), a well-
known Greek title of the Sea-goddess of Cyprus. The Milesians would 
naturally have brought the cult of the Sea-goddess and of her son Hercules 
with them to Ireland, and would have found the necessary stone-altars 
already in position.) 
In the Peloponnese the Olympic Games were the occasion of this 
agricultural Hercules's death and of the election of his successor. The 
legend is that they were founded in celebration of Zeus's emasculation of 
Cronos; since the tomb of the early Achaean Oak-king Pelops was at 
Olympia, this means that the oak-cult was there superimposed on the 
Pelasgian barley-cult. The most ancient event in the Games was a race 
between fifty young priestesses of the Goddess Hera for the privilege 
of becoming the new Chief Priestess. Hercules was cut into pieces and 
eucharistically eaten as before, until perhaps the later Achaeans put an 
end to the practice, and for centuries after retained some of his oak-tree 
characteristics: he was known as the 'green Zeus'. The sacrifice of the 
agricultural Hercules, or the victim offered in his stead, continued to 
take place within a stone-circle dedicated to the Barley Mother. At 
Hermion, near Corinth, the stone-circle was in ritual use until Christian 
times. 
Hercules of Canopus, or Celestial Hercules, is a fusion of the first two 
types of Hercules with Asclepius, or Aesculapius, the God of Healing, 
himself a fusion of the Barley-god with a Fire-god. Aesculapius is de-
scribed by mythographers as a son of Apollo, partly because Apollo in 
Classical times was identified with the Sun-god Helios; partly because the 
priesthood of the Aesculapian cult, which was derived from that of Thoth, 
1 3 2 
the Egyptian god of healing and inventor of letters, had been driven from 
Phoenicia (about the year 1400 B.C.?) and taken refuge in the islands of 
Cos, Thasos and Delos, where Apollo was by then the ruling deity. 
Whenin the fifth century B.C. Herodotus tried to extract information 
about Canopic Hercules from the Egyptian priests, they referred him to 
Phoenicia as the land of his origin. We know that the Phoenician Hercules, 
Melkarth ('King of the City'), died yearly and that the quail was his bird 
of resurrection; which means that when the migrant quail arrives in 
Phoenicia early in March from the South, the oak begins to leaf and the 
new King celebrates his royal marriage. Melkarth was revived when 
Esmun ('He whom we invoke'), the local Aesculapius, held a quail to his 
nose. The quail is notorious for its pugnacity and lechery. But at 
Canopus, in the Nile Delta, the cults of Melkarth and Esmun, or Hercules 
and Aesculapius, appear to have been fused by Egyptian philosophers: 
Hercules was worshipped both as the healer and as the healed. Apollo 
himself had reputedly been born on Ortygia ('Quail Island'), the islet 
off Delos; so Canopic Hercules is Apollo, too, in a sense—is Apollo, 
Aesculapius (alias Cronos, Saturn or Bran), Thoth, Hermes (whom the 
Greeks identified with Thoth), Dionysus (who in the early legends is an 
alias of Hermes), and Melkarth, to whom King Solomon, as son-in-law to 
King Hiram, was priest, and who immolated himself on a pyre, like Hercules 
of Oeta. Hercules Melkarth was also worshipped at Corinth under the name 
of Melicertes, the son of the Pelasgian White Goddess Ino of Pelion. 
Hercules becomes more glorious still, as Celestial Hercules. The myth-
ographers record that he borrowed the golden cup of the Sun, shaped like 
a water lily or lotus, for the homeward journey from one of his Labours. 
This was the cup in which the Sun, after sinking in the West, nightly 
floated round again to the East along the world-girdling Ocean stream. 
The lotus, which grows as the Nile rises, typified fertility, and so attached 
itself to the Egyptian sun-cult. 'Hercules' in Classical Greece became 
in fact another name for the Sun. Celestial Hercules was worshipped both 
as the undying Sun, and as the continually dying and continually renewed 
Spirit of the Year—that is, both as a god and as a demi-god. This is the 
type of Hercules whom the Druids worshipped as Ogma Sun-face, the 
lion-skinned inventor of Letters,1 god of eloquence, god of healing, god of 
fertility, god of prophecy; and whom the Greeks worshipped as 'assigner 
of titles', as ruler of the Zodiac, as president of festivals, as founder of 
cities, as healer of the sick, as patron of archers and athletes. 
Hercules is represented in Greek art as a bull-necked champion, and 
1 The ape, the sacred animal which identified this Hercules with Thoth the inventor of 
Letters, does not seem to have become acclimatized in Western Europe. In Egypt , Thoth was 
sometimes portrayed as an ape, in Asia Minor he merely led one; the tradition apparendy 
originates in India. 
1 3 3 
may for all practical purposes be identified with the demi-god Dionysus 
of Delphi, whose totem was a white bull. Plutarch of Delphi, a priest of 
Apollo, in his essay On Isis and Osiris compares the rites of Osiris with 
those of Dionysus. He writes: 
The affair about the Titans and the Night of Accomplishment 
corresponds with what are called 'Tearings to pieces', 'Resurrections' 
and 'Regenerations' in the rites of Osiris. The same applies to burial 
rites. There are burial chests of Osiris in many Egyptian cities; similarly 
we claim at Delphi that the remains of Dionysus are buried near the 
place of the Oracle. And our consecrated priests perform a secret sacri-
fice in Apollo's sanctuary at the time of the awakening of the Divine 
Child by the Thyiades. 
Thus 'Hercules' is seen to be also another name for Osiris whose yearly 
death is still celebrated in Egypt, even after thirteen centuries of 
Mohammedanism. Rubber is now used for the traditional fertility symbol; 
prodigiously inflated, it still excites the same cries of laughter and grief as 
in the days of Joseph the Patriarch and Joseph the Carpenter. 
Plutarch carefully distinguishes Apollo (Hercules as god) from 
Dionysus (Hercules as demi-god). This Apollo never dies, never changes 
his shape; he is eternally young, strong and beautiful. Dionysus perpetu-
ally changes, like Proteus the Pelasgian god, or Periclymenus the Minyan, 
son of Neleus, or die ancient Irish Uath Mac Immomuin ('Horror son of 
Terror'), into an infinity of shapes. So Pentheus in the Bacckae of Euri-
pides charges him to appear 'as a wild bull, as a many-headed snake, or as 
a fire-breathing lion'—whichever he pleases: almost exactly in the words 
of the Welsh bard Cynddelw, a contemporary of Gruffudd ap Kynan's: 
Yn rith llew rac llyw goradein,yn rith dreic rac dragon prydein. 
Thus in Britain, Amathaon was Hercules as Dionysus; his father Beli 
was Hercules as Apollo. 
Plutarch writes, in his essay On the Ei at Delphi, revealing as much 
Orphic secret doctrine as he dares: 
In describing the manifold changes of Dionysus into winds, water, 
earth, stars and growing plants and animals, they use the riddling 
expressions 'render asunder' and 'tearing limb from limb'. And they 
call the god 'Dionysus' or 'Zagreus' ('the torn') or 'The Night Sun' 
or 'The Impartial Giver', and record various Destructions, Dis-
appearances, Resurrections and Rebirths, which are their mythographic 
account of how those changes came about. 
That Gwion knew Hercules to be another name for Ogma Sun-face, 
the inventor of the Ogham alphabet, is made perfectly clear in his Elegy 
on 'Ercwlf where the alphabet figures as the four pillars, of five letters 
each, that support the whole edifice of literature: 
1 3 4 
M A R W N A D E R C W L F 
The earth turns, 
So night follows day. 
When lived the renowned 
Ercwlf, chiefofbaptism f 
Ercwlfsaid 
He did not take account ofdeath. 
The shield of Mordei 
By him was broken. 
Ercwlf placed in order, 
Impetuous, frantic, 
Four columns of equal height, 
Red gold upon them, 
A work not easily to be believed, 
Easily believed it will not be. 
The heat ofthe sun did not vex him; 
None went nearer heaven 
Than he went. 
Ercwlf the wall-breaker, 
Thou art beneath the sand; 
May the Trinity give thee 
A merciful day of judgement. 
'The shield of Mordei' is a reference to the famous Batde of Catterick 
Bridge in the late sixth century A.D.: 
Ym Mordeiystyngeo dyledawr. 
'In Mordei he laid low the mighty.' 
The 'he' is a British hero named Erthgi, presumably a reincarnation of 
Ercwlf, who 'went to Catterick in the dawn with the aspect of a prince in 
the shield-guarded battle-field'. The reference to Hercules as 'Chief of 
Baptism' identifies him with St. John the Baptist, in whose honour 
Hercules's midsummer fires were lighted in Gwion's day. As Sir James 
Frazer points out, Midsummer Day was always a water as well as a fire 
festival. 'May the Trinity give thee a merciful day of judgement' is Gwion's 
view of Hercules as resident 'in limbo patrum—in the abode of the just 
who had died before Jesus Christ's advent. Baptism was not, of course, 
invented by the Christians. They had it from St. John, and he had it from 
the Hemero-baptists, a mysterious Hebrew sect usually regarded as a 
branch of the Pythagorean Essenes, who worshipped Jehovah in his Sun-
god aspect. It should be observed that the devotees of the Thracian god-
dess Cotytto, the mother of the Cottians, had employed mystagogues 
1 3 5 
called 'Baptists'—-whether this was because they baptized the devotee 
before the orgies, or because they were charged with the ritual dipping 
(dyeing) of clothes or hair, is disputed—and that both the ancient Irish 
and ancient British used baptism before the Christians came. This is 
recorded in the Irish tales of Conall Derg and Conall Kernach, and the 
Welsh tale of Gwri of the Golden Hair. 
Taliesin's name in Welsh means 'radiant brow', a characteristic of 
Apollo's, but the 'TaFsyllable is often present in the primitive names of 
Hercules. In Crete he was Talus, the man of bronze, whom Medea killed. 
In Pelasgia he was the tortured Tan-talus, from whose name the word 
'tantalize' derives. The Irish Tailltean Games are probably called after 
an agricultural Hercules the first syllable of whose name was Tal. In Syria 
he was Telmen. In Greece he was Atlas Telamon, and 'Atlas', like 
'Telamon', was derived from the root Tla or Tal which contains the 
senses 'take upon oneself, 'dare', and 'suffer'. Dr. MacCulloch suggests 
that 'Taliesin' is also a divine name and that the swallowing of the grain 
of corn by the black hen in the Romance of Taliesin proves Taliesin to 
have been a Barley-god. 
The time has now come to draw closely around the thicket where the 
Roebuck is known to be harboured. And here is a hunting song from 
Gwion's poem, Angar Cyvyndawd: 
Bum Twrchym Mynydd 
Bum cyff mewn rhaw 
Bum bwallyn Haw. 
I have been a roebuck on the mountain, 
I have been a tree stump in a shovel, 
I have been an axe in the hand. 
But we must transpose the lines of the couplet, because logically the axe 
comes first, then the tree is cut down, and one cannot put the oak-stump 
into one's shovel unless it has been reduced to ashes—which are after-
wards used to fertilize the fields. So: 
I have been a roebuck on the mountain, 
I have been an axe in the hand, 
I have been a tree stump in a shovel. 
If one looks carefully again at the names of the fifteen consonants of 
the Boibel-Loth, or the Babel-Lota, one notices clear correspondences 
with Greek legend. Not only 'Taliesin' with 'Talus', and 'Teilmon' with 
'Telamon', but 'Moiria' with the 'Moirae', the Three Fates; and 'Cailep' 
with 'Calypso', daughter of Atlas, whose island of Ogygia—placed by 
Plutarch in the Irish Seas—was protected by the very same enchantment 
as Morgan le Faye's Avalon, Cerridwen's Caer Sidi, or Niamh of the 
1 3 6 
Golden Hair's 'Land of Youth'. Put the whole series of letter-names into 
the nearest Greek words that make any sort of sense, using Latin char-
acters and allowing for the difference between Greek and Irish vowels 
(the ancillary I in Irish is used as a sign of a long vowel) and for trans-
position of letters. Retain the digamma(ForV)inwords in which it origi-
nally occurred, such as ACHAIVA and DAVIZO, and use the Aeolic A for 
long E , in F O R E M E N O S , N E - E G A T O S , GETHEO. 
The consonants spell out the familiar story of Hercules in three 
chapters of five words each: 
BOIBEL B BOIBALION I, the Roebuck fawn 
(or Antelope-bull calf) 
LOTH L L O T O - On the Lotus 
FORANN F FORAMENON Ferried 
S A L I A S SALOOMAI Lurch to and fro 
NEIAGADON N N E - A G A T O N New-born 
UIRIA H URIOS I, the Guardian of Boundaries 
(or the Benignant One) 
DAIBHAITH D DAVIZO Cleave wood. 
TEILMON T TELAMON I, the suffering one 
Or TLAMON 
CAOI C CAIOMAI Am consumed by fire, 
CAILEP CC CALYPTOMAI Vanish. 
MOIRIA M MOIRAO I distribute, 
GATH G GATHEO I rejoice, 
NGOIMAR NG GNORIMOS I, the famous one, 
IDRA Y IDRYOMAI Establish, 
RHEA R RHEO I flow away. 1 
1 As an alphabetic invocation it goes readily into English rhyme, with Kn standing for Ng 
and J for Y : 
B ull-calfin 
L otus-cup 
F erried, or 
S waying 
N ew-dressed, 
H elpful 
D ivider, in 
T orment, 
C onsumed beyond 
Q uest, 
M ete us out 
G aiety, 
Knightliest 
J udge, 
R unning west. 
1 3 7 
The vowels do not spell out a story but they characterize the progress 
of Hercules through the five stations of the year, typified by the five petals 
of the Lotus-cup—Birth, Initiation, Marriage, Rest from Labour, and 
Death: 
A C H A I V A The Spinner—a title of Demeter, the White Goddess. 
(Compare also Acca in the Roman Hercules myth, and 
Acco the Greek bug-bear who devoured new-born 
children.) 
O S S A Fame. (Also the name of a sacred mountain in Magnesia, 
and a sacred hill at Olympia.) 
U R A N I A The Queen of Heaven. The word is perhaps derived 
from ouros, a mountain, and ana, queen. But Ura (oura) 
means the tail of a lion (sacred to Anatha, the Mountain-
goddess, Queen of Heaven) and since the lion expresses 
anger with its tail the word may mean 'The Queen with 
the Lion Tail'; certainly the Greek name for the Asp-
Crown of Egypt which the Pharaohs wore by mother-
• right was 'Uraeus', meaning 'of the Lion Tail', the Asp 
being sacred to the same Goddess. 
( H ) E S U C H I A Repose. The word is probably shortened in honour of 
the Celtic God Esus, who is shown in a Gaulish bas-
relief plucking festal branches, with a left hand where 
his right should be. 
I A C H E M A Shrieking, or Hissing. 
The boibalis or boibalus (also boubalis or boubalus) is the ferocious 
Libyan white antelope-ox or leucoryx, from which according to Herodotus 
the Phoenicians made the curved sides of their lyres—with which they 
celebrated Hercules Melkarth. 
Gwion's version of the alphabet, with Rhea for Riuben, is older than 
O'Flaherty's if O'Flaherty's 'Riuben' stands for Rymbonao, 'I swing 
about again'—a word first used in the second century A .D. ; the difference 
between Gwion's 'Salome', and O'Flaherty's 'Salia' also suggests that 
Gwion had an older version. That he has altered 'Telamon' to 'Taliesin' 
suggests that he is offering Talasinods, 'he that dares to suffer', as an 
alternative to 'Telamon', which has the same meaning. Ne-esthan, the 
Greek Septuagint transliteration of 'Nehushtan' (2 Kings, XVIII, 4) as 
an equivalent of ne-agaton is puzzling. But since Nehushtan was a name of 
contempt, meaning 'a piece of brass', said to have been given by King 
Hezekiah to the therapeutic Serpent or Seraph when idolatrously wor-
shipped by his subjects, it is possible that Gwion read the original holy 
name as the Greek Neo-sthenios, or Neo-sthenaros, 'with new strength', of 
which 'Nehushtan' was a Hebrew parody. This would imply that a Jew 
138 
of Hellenistic times, not Hezekiah, invented the parody name; which is 
historically more plausible than the Biblical account. For it is incredible 
that Hezekiah took exception to idolatry: the Jews attempted to dispense 
with idols only in post-Exilic times. 
But though we have learned the secret story of the Spirit of the Year, 
the Name of the transcendent God still remains hidden. The obvious place 
to look for it is among the vowels, which are separated from the Hercules 
story told by the consonants; but Dog, Lapwing, and Roebuck must have 
learned wisdom after the Battle of the Trees and hidden their secret more 
deeply even than before. 
Gwion evidently knew the Name, and it was this knowledge that gave 
him his authority at Maelgwn's Court. He says in the Cyst Wy'r Beirdd 
('Reproof of the Bards'): 
Unless you are acquainted with the powerful Name, 
Be silent, Heinin! 
As to the lofty Name 
And the powerful Name 
The best hope of guessing it lies in finding out first what the Name was 
that Gwydion succeeded in discovering with Amathaon's aid, and then 
what refinement he made on his discovery. 
139 
Chapter Nine 
GWION'S HERESY 
The concentrated essence of Druidic, as of Orphic Greek, philo-sophy was Rheo, 'I flow away', Gwion's letter-name for R : — 'Panta Rhei', 'all things flow'. The main problem of paganism is 
contained in Riuben, the alternative name for R, if this stands for 
Rymbonao:—'Must all things swing round again for ever? Or how can 
one escape from the Wheel?' This was the problem of the blinded Sun-
hero Samson when he was harnessed to the corn-mill of Gaza; and it 
should be noted that the term 'corn-mill' was applied in Greek philosophy 
to the revolving heavens. Samson resolved the problem magnificently by 
pulling down both posts of the temple so that the roof collapsed upon 
everyone. The Orphics had another, quieter solution and engraved it in 
cypher on gold tablets tied around the necks of their beloved dead. It was: 
not to forget, to refuse todrink the water of cypress-shaded Lethe how-
ever thirsty one might be, to accept water only from the sacred (hazel-
shaded?) pool of Persephone, and thus to become immortal Lords of the 
Dead, excused further Tearings-to-Pieces, Destructions, Resurrections 
and Rebirths. The cypress was sacred to Hercules, who had himself 
planted the famous cypress grove at Daphne, and typified rebirth; and the 
word 'cypress' is derived from Cyprus, which was called after Cyprian 
Aphrodite, his mother. The cult of the sacred cypress is Minoan in origin 
and must have been brought to Cyprus from Crete. 
The Hercules-god of the Orphic mystics was Apollo the Hyper-
borean; and in the first century A . D . Aelian, the Roman historian, records 
that Hyperborean priests visited Tempe in Northern Greece regularly to 
worship Apollo. Diodorus Siculus in his quotation from Hecataeus makes 
it clear that in the sixth century B.C. the 'land of the Hyperboreans', where 
Apollo's mother Latona was born, and where Apollo was honoured above 
all other gods, was Britain. This does not contradict Herodotus's account 
of an altogether different Hyperborean priesthood, probably Albanian, 
living near the Caspian Sea; or the view that in Aelian's time, Ireland, 
which lay outside the Roman Empire, may have been 'the Land of the 
Hyperboreans'; or the view, which I propose later in this book, that the 
original Hyperboreans were Libyans. 
140 
Edward Davies was justified in regarding these British priests as 
a sort of Orphics: dress, dogma, ritual and diet correspond closely. And 
since Cad Goddeu proves to have been a battle of letters rather than a 
battle of trees, his suggestion that the fabulous dance of trees to Orpheus's 
lyre was, rather, a dance of letters, makes good historical and poetic 
sense.1 Orpheus is recorded by Diodorus to have used the Pelasgian 
alphabet. That Gwion identified the Celestial Hercules of the Boibel-
Loth with the Orphic Apollo is plain from this perfectly clear passage 
embedded in the riddling mazes of Cad Goddeu: 
It is long since I was a herdsman. 
I travelled over the earth 
Before I became a learnedperson. 
I have travelled, I have made a circuit, 
I have slept in a hundred islands, 
I have dwelt in a hundred cities. 
Learned Druids, 
Prophesy ye ofArthur? 
Or is it me they celebrate? 
Only Apollo can be the T of this passage. He was herdsman to 
Admetus, the Minyan king of Pherae in Thessaly, several centuries before 
he set up at Delphi as the Leader of the Muses. And as a pre-Greek oracular 
hero he had been laid to rest in a hundred sacred islands. Once the Greeks 
had found it convenient to adopt him as their god of healing and music, 
hundreds of cities came to honour him and by Classical times he was 
making his daily and yearly circuit as the visible sun. Gwion is hinting 
to Heinin and the other court-bards that the true identity of the hero 
whom they thoughtlessly eulogize as King Arthur is Hercules-Dionysus, 
rex quondam, rex-que futurus ('King once and King again to be'), who 
at his second coming will be the immortal Hercules-Apollo. But they 
will not understand. 'It is long since I was a herdsman' will convey 
nothing to them but a memory of Triad 85 where the Three Tribe Herds-
men of Britain are given as Gwydion who kept the herd of the tribe of 
Gwynedd, Bennren who kept the herd of Caradoc son of Bran consisting 
1 But there may also have been a plainer meaning for the dance of trees. According to 
Apollonius Rhodius, the wild oak trees which Orpheus had led down from the Pierian 
mountain were still standing in ordered ranks in his day at Zone in Thrace. If they were 
arranged as if for dancing that would mean not in a stiff geometrical pattern, such as a square, 
triangle or avenue, but in a curved one. Zone ('a woman's girdle') suggests a round dance in 
honour of the Goddess. Yet a circle of oaks, like a fastened girdle, would not seem to be 
dancing: the oaks would seem to be standing as sentinels around a dancing floor. The dance 
at Zone was probably an orgiastic one of the 'loosened girdle': for 7one in Greek also means 
marriage, or the sexual act, the disrobing of a woman. It is likely therefore that a broad girdle 
of oaks planted in a double rank was coiled in on itself so that they seemed to be dancing 
spirally to the centre and then out again. 
1 4 1 
of 21,000 milch kine, and Llawnrodded Varvawc who kept the equally 
numerous herd of Nudd Hael. Gwion had fetched his learning from 
Ireland, and perhaps from Egypt, but re-grafted it on a British stock. 
For though Druidism as an organized religion had been dead in Wales for 
hundreds of years, reliques of Druidic lore were contained in the tradi-
tional corpus of minstrel poetry, and in popular religious ritual. The 
primitive Druidic cult, which involved ritual cannibalism after omens had 
been taken from the victim's death struggle, had been suppressed by the 
Roman general Paulinus in 61 A . D . when he conquered Anglesey and cut 
down the sacred groves; the continental Druidism already adopted by the 
rest of Britain south of the Clyde was respectable Belin, or Apollo, worship 
of Celto-Thracian type. 
From the Imperial Roman point of view Belin-worship constituted 
no political danger once its central authority, the Druidic Synod at Dreux, 
had been broken by Caesar's defeat of Vercingetorix and animal victims 
had been substituted for human ones. The British priests were not con-
verted to Roman religion, for the Roman Pantheon was already allied to 
theirs and the Mithras-worship of the Roman legionaries was merely an 
Oriental version of their own Hercules cult. That they should honour 
the Emperor as the temporal incarnation of their variously named Sun-
god was the only religious obligation put upon them, and they cannot 
have found it a difficult one. When Christianity became the official 
Roman religion, no attempt was made to coerce the natives into uniformity 
of worship and even in the towns the churches were small and poor; most 
of the large pagan temples remained in operation, it seems. There was no 
religious problem in Britain, as there was in Judaea, until the Romans 
withdrew their garrisons and the barbarous Jutes, Angles and Saxons 
poured in from the East, and the civilized Roman Britons fled before them 
into Wales or across the Channel. But the presence in England of these 
barbarians at least protected the Welsh and Irish churches from any effective 
intervention in their religious affairs by continental Catholicism, and the 
Archiepiscopal See of St. David's remained wholly independent until the 
twelfth century, when the Normans pressed the right of the Archbishop of 
Canterbury to control it; which was the occasion of the Anglo-Welsh wars. 
What, for the early Church Councils, seemed the most diabolical and 
unpardonable heresy of all was the identification of the Hercules-
Dionysus-Mithras bulk whose living flesh the Orphic ascetics tore and 
ate in their initiation ceremony, with Jesus Christ whose living flesh was 
symbolically torn and eaten in the Holy Communion. With this heresy, 
which was second-century Egyptian, went another, the identification of 
the Virgin Mary with the Triple Goddess. The Copts even ventured to 
combine 'the Three Maries' who were spectators of the Crucifixion into a 
single character, with Mary Cleopas as a type of 'Blodeuwedd', the Virgin 
142 
of 'Arianrhod', and Mary Magdalen as the third person of this ancient 
trinity, who appears in Celtic legend as Morgan le Faye, King Arthur's 
sister. Morgan in Irish legend is 'the Morrigan', meaning 'Great Queen', 
a Death-goddess who assumed the form of a raven; and 'le Faye' means 
'the Fate'. According to Cormac's Glossary the Morrigan was invoked in 
battle by an imitadon on war-horns of a raven's croaking. She was by no 
means the gentle character familiar to readers of the Morte D'Arthurbut 
like the 'black screaming hag Cerridwen' in the Romance of Taliesin was 
'big-mouthed, swarthy, swift, sooty, lame, with a cast in her left eye'. 
Wherever these heresies survived in mediaeval Europe the Church 
visited them with such terrible penalties that British or Irish poets who 
played with them must have derived a dangerous joy from wrapping 
them up, as Gwion has done here, in riddling disguises. One can sym-
pathize with the poets, in so far as their predecessors had accepted Jesus 
Christ without compulsion and had reserved the right to interpret 
Christianity in the light of their literary tradition, without interference. 
They saw Jesus as the latest theophany of the same suffering sacred king 
whom they had worshipped under various names from time immemorial. 
As soon as the big stick of Orthodoxy was waved at them from Rome or 
Canterbury they felt a pardonable resentment. The first Christian mission-
aries had conducted themselves with scrupulous courtesy towards the 
devotees of the pagan Sun-cult, with whom they had much mystical 
doctrine in common. Celtic and pre-Celtic gods and goddesses became 
Christian saints—for instance, St. Brigit, whose perpetual sacred fire was 
kept alight in a monastery at Kildare until the time of Henry VIII—and 
heathen festivals became Christianized with only a slight change of ritual. 
St Brigit according to The Calendar of Oengus retained her original fire-
feast, Feile Brighde, on the evening of February ist. She was so important 
that bishops were her Master-craftsmen; one of these, Connlaed, is said to 
have disobeyed her and to have been thrown to the wolves at her orders. 
She was greeted in the Hymn of Broccan as 'Mother of my Sovereign', and 
in the Hymn of Ultan as 'Mother of Jesus'. (She had once been mother of 
The Dagda). In The Book of Lismore she is named: 'The Prophetess of 
Christ, the Queen of the South, the Mary of the Goidels'. Exactly the 
same thing had happened in Greece and Italy, where the Goddess Venus 
became St. Venere; the Goddess Artemis, St. Artemidos; the Gods 
Mercury and Dionysus, S S . Mercourios and Dionysius; the Sun-god 
Helios, St. Elias. In Ireland, when St. Columcille founded his church 
at D e n y ('Oak-wood') he was 'so loth to fell certain sacred trees that he 
turned his oratory to face north rather than east'—north, towards Caer 
Arianrhod. And when he was in Scotland he declared that 'though he 
feared Death and Hell, the sound of an axe in the grove of Deny fright-
ened him still more'. But the age of toleration did not last long; once Irish 
143 
princes lost the privilege of appointing bishops from their own sept, and 
iconoclasts were politically strong enough to begin their righteous work, 
the axes rose and fell on every sacred hill. 
It would be unfair to call the heretical poets 'apostates'. They were 
interested in poetic values and relations rather than in prose dogma. It 
must have been irksome for them to be restricted in their poem-making 
by ecclesiastical conventions. 'Is it reasonable?' they may have exclaimed. 
'The Pope, though he permits our typifying Jesus as a Fish, as the Sun, as 
Bread, as the Vine, as a Lamb, as a Shepherd, as a Rock, as a Conquering 
Hero, even as a Winged Serpent, yet threatens us with Hell Fire if we ever 
dare to celebrate him in terms of the venerable gods whom He has super-
seded and from whose ritual every one of these symbols has been derived. 
Or if we trip over a simple article of this extraordinarily difficult Athan-
asian Creed. We need no reminder from Rome or Canterbury that Jesus 
was the greatest of all Sacred Kings who suffered death on a tree for the 
good of the people, who harrowed Hell and who rose again from the 
Dead and that in Him all prophecies are fulfilled. But to pretend that he 
was the first whom poets have ever celebrated as having performed these 
wonderful feats is, despite St. Paul, to show oneself either hypocritical or 
illiterate. So at his prophesied Second Coming we reserve the right to call 
him Belin or Apollo or even King Arthur.' 
The most virtuous and enlightened of the early Roman Emperors, 
Alexander Severus (222-235 A.D.) had held almost precisely the same 
view. He considered himself a reincarnation of Alexander the Great and, 
according to his biographer Lampridius, worshipped among his house-
gods Abraham, Orpheus, Alexander and Jesus Christ. This mention 
of Alexander Severus suggests a reconsideration of the discredited word 
'Helio-Arkite', which was used at the beginning of the nineteenth 
century to describe a hypothetic heathen cult revived by the bards as a 
Christian heresy, in which the Sun and Noah's Ark were the principal 
objects of worship. 'Arkite' without the 'Helio-', was first used by the 
antiquary J^cob Bryant in 1774 in his Analysis of Ancient Mythology; but 
the word is incorrecdy formed if it is to mean 'Arcian', or 'Arcensian', 
'concerned with the Ark', as Bryant intended, since '-ite' is a termination 
which denotes tribal or civic origin, not religious opinion. It seems indeed 
as if Bryant had borrowed the word 'Arkite' from some ancient work on 
religion and had misunderstood it. 
There is only one famous Arkite in religious history—this same 
Alexander Severus, who was called 'the Arkite' because he was born in the 
temple of Alexander the Great at Arka in the Lebanon, where his Roman 
parents were attending a festival. His mother, Mamea, was some sort of 
Christian. The Arkites who are mentioned in Genesis, X, 7, and also in the 
Tell Amarna tablets of 1400 B.C. , were an ancient Canaanite people we 11-
144 
known for their worship of the Moon-goddess Astarte, or Ishtar, to whom 
the acacia-wood ark was sacred; but Arka, which in the Tell Amarna 
tablets appears as 'Irkata', was not necessarily connected with the Indo-
European root arc—meaning 'protection', from which we derive such 
Latin words as arceo, 'I ward off', area, 'an ark', and arcana, 'religious 
secrets'. The Arkites are listed in Genesis X with the Amathites, the 
Lebanon Hivites (probably Achaifites, or Achaeans) and the Gergasites 
of Lower Galilee, who seem to have originated in Gergithion near Troy 
and to be the people whom Herodotus names 'the remnants of the ancient 
Teucrians'. The Arkite cult, later the Arkite heresy, was Alexander 
Severus's own syncretic religion and in this sense of the word, Gwion 
may be styled an Arkite. The Sun and the Ark are, indeed, the most 
important elements of the Hercules myth, and Ishtar in the Gilgamesh 
Deluge romance of Babylonia, plays the same false part towards Gil-
gamesh as Blodeuwedd plays to Llew Llaw in the Mabinogion, or Delilah 
to Samson in Judges, or Deianeira to Hercules in Classical legend. It is 
a great pity that Bryant's enthusiastic followers tried to substantiate a 
sound thesis by irresponsible and even fraudulent arguments. 
The complimentary reference to the See of St. David in Gwion's riddle 
—it is important to notice that St. David himself was a miraculous child, 
born from a chaste nun—and the anti-English vaticinations of a tenth-
century poet, who also called himself Taliesin, which are bound up with 
the Gwion poems in the Red Book oj Hergest, suggest that Gwion was 
hopefully trying to revive the Arkite heresy and elevate it into a popular 
pan-Celtic religion which should also include the Celticized Danes of the 
Dublin region and unite the Bretons, Irish, Welsh, and Scots in a political 
confederacy against the Anglo-Norman-French. If so, nis hopes were dis-
appointed. The Angevins were too strong: by 1282 Wales had become 
a province of England, the Normans were firmly established at Dublin and 
the head of Llewellyn Prince of North Wales, the leader of the nation, had 
been brought to London and exhibited on Tower Hill, crowned with an 
ivy wreath: in mocking allusion to the Welsh prophecy that he should be 
crownedthere. Nevertheless, Gwion's romance continued to be recited, and 
Welsh nationalism was revived towards the end of the fourteenth century 
under Prince Owen Glendower, who had a doubtful claim to descent from 
this same Prince Llewellyn, the last prince of the royal line that had been 
ruling Wales since the third century A . D . Glendower, whose cause was 
supported by a new self-styled 'Taliesin', kept up a desultory war, with 
French help, until his death in 1416. 
It was about that time that Dr. Sion Kent, the parish priest of Ken-
church, complained of what seems to have been the same Arkite heresy, 
since Hu Gadarn, the hero who led the Cymry into Britain from Taprobane 
(Ceylon), was invoked in it as an allegorical champion of Welsh liberty: 
M5 
Two kinds of inspiration in good truth 
Exist and manifest their course on earth: 
Inspiration from sweet-spoken Christ, 
Orthodox and gladdening the soul, 
And that most unwise other Inspiration, 
Concerned with false andfilthy prophecy 
Received by the devotees of Hu (Gadarn), 
The unjustly usurping bards of IVlies. 
The 'false and filthy prophecies' probably concerned the expulsion of the 
English from Wales and the restored independence of the Welsh Church. 
Dr. Kent, whose name suggests that he was not of Welsh blood, was 
naturally anxious for the future, especially since nationalism implied an 
open return of the people of Kenchurch to a great many pagan supersti-
tions which he spent much of his time trying to suppress; and perhaps, as a 
poet, was also jealous of the influence of the minstrels over his flock. 
That the minstrels continued to stir up popular feeling by their anti-
English vaticinations even after the fall of Owen Glendower is suggested 
by the repressive law of Henry IV enacted in 1402: 'To eschew many 
diseases and mischiefs which have happened before this time in the Land 
of Wales by many wasters, rhymers, minstrels and other vagabonds. It is 
ordained and stablished that no waster, rhymer, minstrel nor vagabond be 
in any wise sustained in the Land of Wales to make commorthies' [i.e. 
kymhorthau, 'neighbourly gatherings'] 'or gatherings upon the common 
people there.' Pennant in his Tours comments that the object of these 
commorthies was to 'collect a sufficient number of able-bodied men to 
make an insurrection'. 
It is possible that the original Gwion who revived Druidism in Wales, 
as a pan-Celtic political weapon against the English, lived as early as in the 
reign of Prince Owain Gwynedd, son of the gifted Prince Grufudd ap 
Kynan who first brought Irish bards into North Wales; Owain reigned 
from 1 1 3 7 to 1169 and resisted the armies of King Henry II with far 
greater success than either the Scots, Bretons or Irish. Cynddelw, in 
whose poems the word Druid first occurs, addressed Owain as 'The Door 
of the Druids', 'door' being mentioned as a synonym for the princely oak 
in the Cad Goddeu. Owain may also be the he""> celebrated in the badly 
garbled Song ofDaronwy, from the Book of Taliesin: 
In driving back the oppressor across the sea 
What tree has been greater than he, Daronwy? 
Daronwy means 'thunderer', another synonym for oak, and Owain had 
driven off with heavy loss the sea-borne expedition which Henry sent 
against Anglesey in 1 1 5 7 . 
If anyone should doubt that Gwion could have picked up the Greek 
146 
and Hebrew knowledge necessary to the construction of this riddle in 
Ireland, here is a passage from C. S. Boswell's edition of the tenth-
century Irish Fis Adamnain, "The Vision of St. Adamnain: 
While the Christian Church of Teutonic England owed its existence, 
in the main, to the missionary enterprise of Rome, the much older 
Celtic Churches, and notably the Church of Ireland, were more closely 
connected with Gaul and the East. It was to Gaul that Ireland was 
mainly indebted for its original conversion, and the intercourse be-
tween the two countries remained close and unbroken. But the Church 
in the south of Gaul—and it was the south alone that preserved any 
considerable culture, or displayed any missionary activity, in the early 
Middle Ages—had from the very first been closely in touch with the 
Churches in the East. The great monastery of Lerins, in which St. 
Patrick is said to have studied, was founded from Egypt, and for many 
centuries the Egyptian Church continued to manifest a lively interest 
in Gallic matters. Indeed, not only Lerins, but Marseilles, Lyons, and 
other parts of Southern Gaul maintained a constant intercourse with 
both Egypt and Syria, with the natural result that many institutions of 
the Gallic Church, despite its increasing subjection to Rome, dating 
from the year 244, bore the impress of Oriental influences. Hence the 
close relations with Gaul maintained by the Irish churchmen and 
scholars necessarily brought them into contact with their Egyptian and 
Syrian brethren, and with the ideas and practices which prevailed in 
their respective Churches. 
Nor was Ireland's connection with the East confined to the inter-
mediary of Gaul. Irish pilgrimages to Egypt continued until the end of 
the eighth century, and Dicuil records a topographical exploration of 
that country made by two Irishmen, Fidelis and his companion. 
Documentary evidence is yet extant, proving that even home-keeping 
Irishmen were not debarred from all acquaintance with the East. The 
Saltair na Rann contains an Irish version of the Book of Adam and Eve, 
a work written in Egypt in the fifth or sixth century, of which no men-
tion outside of Ireland is known. Adamnain's work, De Locis Sanctis, 
contains an account of the monastery on Mount Tabor, which might 
stand for the description of an Irish monastic community of his day. 
Indeed, the whole system both of the anchoretic and coenobitic life in 
Ireland corresponds closely to that which prevailed in Egypt and Syria; 
the monastic communities, consisting of groups of detached huts or 
beehive cells, and of the other earliest examples of Irish ecclesiastical 
architecture, all suggest Syrian origin; and Dr. G. T. Stokes holds that 
'the Irish schools were most probably modelled after the forms and 
rules of the Egyptian Lauras'. 
147 
But it was not only Syrian and Egyptian influences to which Ireland 
was subjected by its intercourse with South Gaul. The civilization of 
that country was essentially Greek, and so remained for many centuries 
after the Christian era; and this circumstance no doubt contributed to 
the well-known survival of Greek learning in the Irish schools, long 
after it had almost perished in the rest of Western Europe. It is not to 
be supposed that this learning was characterized by accuracy of 
scholarship, or by a wide acquaintance with Classical literature; but 
neither was it always restricted to a mere smattering of the language or, 
to passages and quotations picked up at second-hand. Johannes Scotus 
Erigena translated the works of the pseudo-Areopagite; Dicuil and 
Firghil (Virgilius, Bishop of Salzburg), studied the Greek books of 
Science; Homer, Aristotle, and other Classical authors were known to 
some of the Irish writers; several of the Irish divines were acquainted 
with the Greek Fathers and other theological works. Nor were the 
Greeks in person unknown to Ireland. Many Greek clerics had taken 
refuge there during the Iconoclast persecution, and left traces which 
were recognizable in Archbishop Ussher's day; and the old poem on 
the Fair of Carman makes mention of the Greek merchants who 
resorted thither. 
It is thus apparent that the Irish writer possessed ample means of 
becoming acquainted with the traditions, both oral and written, of the 
Greek and Eastern Churches. The knowledge thus acquired extended 
to the Apocalyptic Visions, as is proved by internal evidence furnished 
by the Irish Visions, both by way of direct reference, and by the nature 
of their contents.It remains to see how far the predilection which the 
Irish writers manifested for this class of literature, and the special 
characteristics which it assumes in their hands, may have been deter-
mined by their familiarity with analogous ideas already existing in their 
national literature. 
At the period in question, the traditional literature of Ireland would 
appear to have entered into the national life to no less a degree than in 
Greece itself. Indeed, in certain respects, it was still more closely inter-
woven with the habits of the people and the framework of society than 
in Greece, for the literary profession was provided for by a public 
endowment, something like that of an established National Church, 
and its professors constituted a body organized by law, and occupying 
a recognized position in the State. 
The reiterated 'I have been' and 'I was' of Gwion's Hemes Taliesin 
riddle suggests that the Boibel-Loth alphabet, which is the solution, 
originally consisted of twenty mystical titles of a single Protean male 
deity, corresponding with his seasonal changes; and that these titles were 
148 
kept secret, at first because of their invocatory power, later because they 
were regarded as heretical by the Christian Church. But why does the 
Boibel-Loth contain so many approximations to Biblical names, taken 
from Genesis and Exodus, which in Christian times had lost their religious 
importance: Lot, Telmen, Jachin, Hur, Caleb, Ne-esthan—all names con-
cerned with Sinai, Southern Judaea and the Edomite Dead Sea region? 
This is the region in which the Essene communities were settled from 
about 150 B .C. to 1 3 2 A . D . The Essenes appear to have been an offshoot of 
the Therapeutae, or Healers, an ascetic Jewish sect setded by Lake 
Mareotis in Egypt; Pliny described them as the strangest religious body 
in the world. Though Jews, and a sort of Pharisees at that, they believed 
in the Western Paradise—of which precisely the same account is given 
by Josephus when describing Essene beliefs as by Homer, Hesiod and 
Pindar—and, like the later Druids, in the return of pure souls to the Sun, 
whose rising they invoked every day. They also avoided animal sacri-
fices, wore linen garments, practised divination, meditated within magic 
circles, were expert in the virtues of plants and precious stones and are 
therefore generally supposed to have been under the philosophic influence 
of Pythagoras, the ascetic pupil of Abaris the Hyperborean. They re-
frained from worshipping at the Jerusalem Temple, perhaps because the 
custom of bowing to the East at dawn had been discontinued there, and 
exacted the penalty of death from anyone who blasphemed God or Moses. 
Since among the Jerusalem Pharisees, Moses as a man could not be 
blasphemed, it follows that for the Essenes he had a sort of divinity. The 
story of Moses in the Pentateuch was the familiar one of Canopic Hercules 
—the God who was cradled in an ark on the river Nile, performed great 
feats, died mysteriously on a mountain-top, and afterwards became a hero 
and judge. But it is plain that the Essenes distinguished the historic 
Moses, who led the Israelites out of Egypt, from the demi-god Moses; 
just as the Greeks distinguished the historic Hercules, Prince of Tiryns, 
from Celestial Hercules. In Chapter Twenty-Five I shall give reasons for 
supposing that though the Essenes adapted the Greek formula of Celestial 
Hercules to their cult of Moses as demi-god, and though they seem to have 
been disciples of Pythagoras, it was from a sixth-century B.C. Jewish 
source that the Pythagoreans derived the new sacred name of God that 
the tribes of Amathaon and Gwydion established in Britain about the 
year 400 B.C. 
The Essene initiates, according to Josephus, were sworn to keep secret 
the names of the Powers who ruled their universe under God. Were these 
Powers the letters of the Boibel-Loth which, together, composed the life 
and death story of their demi-god Moses? 'David' may seem to belong to 
a later context than the others, but it is found as a royal title in a sixteenth-
century B.C. inscription; and the Pentateuch was not composed until long 
149 
after King David's day. Moreover, David for the Essenes was the name 
of the promised Messiah. 
If all the vowel names of the Boibel-Loth, not merely Jaichin, are pre-
ceded by a J, they become Jacab, Jose, Jura, Jesu, Jaichin—which are 
Jacob, Joseph, Jerah, Joshua and Jachin, all names of tribes mentioned in 
Genesis. The Essene series of letter-names, before Gwion in his riddle 
altered some of them to names taken from the New Testament, the Book 
of Enoch, and Welsh and Latin mythology, may be reconstructed as 
follows: 
Jacob Babel Hur Moriah 
Joseph Lot David Gad 
Jerah Ephron Telmen Gomer 
Joshua Salem Kohath Jethro 
Jachin Ne-esthan Caleb Reu 
Of these, only four names are not those of clans or tribes, namely: Babel, 
the home of wisdom; Moriah, Jehovah's holy mountain; Salem, his holy 
city; Ne-esthan, his sacred serpent. It seems possible, then, that the Essene 
version of the Boibel-Loth letter-names was brought to Ireland in early 
Christian times, by Alexandrian Gnostics who were the spiritual heirs of 
the Essenes after Hadrian had suppressed the Order in 1 3 2 A . D . Dr. 
Joyce in his Social History of Ancient Ireland records that in times of 
persecution Egyptian monks often fled to Ireland; and that one Palladius 
was sent from Rome to become a bishop of the Irish Christians long 
before the arrival of St. Patrick. 
The alphabet itself was plainly not of Hebrew origin: it was a Canopic 
Greek calendar-formula taken over by Greek-speaking Jews in Egypt, 
who disguised it with the names of Scriptural characters and places. As I 
suggest in my King Jesus, it is likely that in Essene usage each letter be-
came a Power attendant on the Son of Man—Moses as Celestial Hercules 
—who was subservient to the Ancient of Days, Jehovah as the Trans-
cendent God. It is recorded that the Essene novice wore a blue robe, the 
adept a white one. Was this because the novice was still 'lotus-borne', 
that is to say, not yet initiated? The Egyptian lotus was blue. I also suggest 
in King Jesus that the two mysterious Orders of the Essenes, Samp-
sonians and Helicaeans, were adepts in the calendar mysteries and were 
named after Samson (the second s is a ps in some Greek texts) the sun-
hero and the Helix, or cosmic circle. (An Essene who wished to meditate 
would insulate himself from the world within a circle drawn around him 
on the sand.) The twenty Powers of the Babel-Lot will have been among 
those distastefully mentioned by St. Paul in Galatians IV, 8-10 as 'weak 
and cringing Elements (stoicheia)'. The back-sliding Galatian Jews were 
now again worshipping such Powers as gods, with careful observation of 
1 5 0 
the calendar. In I Corinthians, XV, 24-25 he claims that they have been 
vanquished by Jesus Christ who alone mediates with the Father. Paul's 
influence was decisive: to the orthodox Church they soon became demons, 
not agents of the Divine Will. 
The Essenes invoked angels in their mysteries. Here is something odd: 
that the 'Hounds of Heme the Hunter', or the 'Dogs of Annwm', which 
hunt souls across the sky are, in British folklore, also called 'Gabriel 
ratches' or 'Gabriel hounds'. W h y Gabriel? Was it because Gabriel, 
whose day was Monday, ran errands for Sheol (the Hebrew Hecate) 
and was sent to summon souls to Judgement? This was Hermes's task, 
and Heme, a British oak-god whose memory survived in Windsor Forest 
until the eighteenth century, is generally identified with Hermes. Gabriel 
and Heme are equated in the early thirteenth-century carvings around the 
church door at Stoke Gabriel in South Devon. The angel Gabriel looks 
down from above, but on the right as one enters are carved the wild 
hunter, his teeth bared in a grin and a wispof hair over his face, and a 
brace of his hounds close by. But Hermes in Egypt, though Thoth in 
one aspect, in another was the dog-headed god Anubis, son of Nepthys 
the Egyptian Hecate; so Apuleius pictures him in the pageant at the end of 
The Golden Ass as 'his face sometimes black, sometimes fair, lifting up the 
head of the Dog Anubis'. This makes the equation Gabriel = Heme = 
Hermes = Anubis. But was Gabriel ever equated with Anubis in ancient 
times? By a piece of good luck an Egyptian gem has been found showing 
Anubis with palm and pouch on the obverse, and on the reverse an arch-
angel described as GABRIER SABAO, which means 'Gabriel Sabaoth', the 
Egyptians having, as usual, converted the L into an R. (This gem is 
described in de Haas's Bilderatlas.) Then is 'Annwm', which is a con-
tracted form of 'Annwfn', a Celtic version of'Anubis'? The B of Anubis 
would naturally turn into an F in Welsh. 
So much nonsense has been written about the Essenes by people who 
have not troubled to find out from Josephus, Pliny the Elder, Philo the 
Byblian and others, who they were and what they believed, that I should 
not bring them into this story if it were not for a poem of Gwion's called 
Yr Awdil Vraith, ('Diversified Song'). The text in the Peniardd MSS is 
incomplete, but in some stanzas preferable to that of the Red Book of 
Hergest: 
1 The All-Being made, 
Down the Hebron Vale, 
With his plastic hands, 
Adam s fair form: 
Andfive hundred years, 
Void of any help, 
There he lingered and lay 
Without a soul. 
He again did form, 
In calm paradise, 
From a left-side rib, 
Bliss-throbbing Eve. 
Seven hours they were 
The orchard keeping, 
Till Satan brought strife, 
The Lord of Hell. 
5 Thence were they driven, 
Cold and shivering, 
To gain their living, 
Into this world. 
To bring forth with pain 
Their sons and daughters, 
To have possession 
Of Asia's land. 
Twice five, ten and eight, 
She was self-bearing, 
The mixed burden 
Ofman-woman. 
And once, not hidden, 
She brought forth Abel, 
And Cain the solitary 
Homicide. 
To him and his mate 
Was given a spade, 
To break up the soil, 
Thus to get bread. 
IO The wheat pure and white, 
In tilth to sow, 
Every man to feed, 
Till great yule feast. 
An angelic hand 
From the high Father, 
Brought seed for growing 
That Eve might sow; 
' 5 * 
But she then did hide 
Of the gift a tenth, 
And all did not sow 
In what was dug. 
Black rye then was found, 
And not pure wheat grain, 
To show the mischief, 
Thus of thieving. 
For this thievish act, 
It is requisite, 
That all men shouldpay 
Tithe unto God. 
15 Of the ruddy wine, 
Planted on sunny days, 
And the white wheat planted 
On new-moon nights; 
The wheat rich in grain, 
And red flowing wine 
Christ's pure body make, 
Son of Alpha. 
The wafer is flesh, 
The wine, spilt blood, 
The words of the Trinity 
Consecrate them. 
The concealed books 
From Emmanuel's hands 
Were brought by Raphael 
As Adam's gift. 
When in his old age, 
To his chin immersed 
In Jordan's water, 
He kept a fast. 
20 Twelve young men, 
Four of them angels, 
Sent forth branches 
From the flower Eve. 
To give assistance, 
In every trouble, 
*53 
In all oppression, 
While they wandered. 
Very great care 
Possessed mankind, 
Until they obtained 
The tokens of grace. 
Moses obtained 
In great necessity 
The aid of the three 
Dominical rods. 
Solomon obtained 
In Babel's tower, 
All the sciences 
Of Asia's land. 
25 So did I obtain 
In my bardic books, 
Asia's sciences, 
Europe's too. 
I know their arts, 
Their course and destiny, 
Their going and coming 
Until the end. 
Oh! what misery, 
Through extreme of woe, 
Prophecy will show 
On Troia's race! 
A chain-wearing serpent, 
The pitiless hawk 
With winged weapons, 
From Germany. 
Loegria and Britain 
She will overrun, 
From Lychlyn sea-shore 
To the Severn. 
30 Then will the Britons 
As prisoners be 
By strangers swayed 
From Saxony. 
154 
Their Lord they will praise, 
Their speech they will keep, 
Their land they will lose, 
Except Wild Wales. 
Till some change shall come, 
After long penance, 
When shall be made equal 
The pride of birth. 
Britons then shall have 
Their land and their crown, 
And the stranger swarm 
Shall vanish away. 
All the angel's words, 
As to peace and war, 
Will thus be fulfilled 
To Britain's race. 
The creation of Adam in Hebron rather than in Lower Mesopotamia 
is startling: for many Biblical scholars now regard the first three chapters 
of Genesis as a Jerahmeelite legend from the Negeb of Judaea, which was 
taken over by the Israelites and became Babylonianized during the 
Captivity. Jerahmeel ('beloved of the moon') is yet another name for 
Canopic Hercules. Dr. Cheyne restores the text of Genesis, II, 8, as 
'Yahweh planted a garden in Eden of Jerahmeel.' He writes: 
The Jerahmeelites, from whom the Israelites took the story, prob-
ably located Paradise on a vastly high mountain, sometimes in a garden, 
in some part of Jerahmeelite territory. The mountain with a sacred 
grove on its summit has dropped out of the story in Genesis, II but is 
attested in Eiekiel; and in the Ethiopian Enoch, XXIV the tree of life is 
placed in a mountain range to the south. As to the locality, if it be 
correct that by the Hebrew phrase 'a land flowing with milk and honey' 
a part of the Negeb was originally meant (Numbers, XIII, 23, 23), we 
might infer that this fruitful land with its vines, pomegrante trees and 
fig trees (see Genesis, III, y) had once upon a time been the Jerah-
meelite Paradise. 
The Hebron valley in Soudiern Judaea is four thousand feet above sea-
level and before agriculture started the process of soil-erosion (which, 
according to Walter Clay Lowdermilk's recent survey of Palestine, has 
taken an average of three feet of soil from the whole country), must have 
been wonderfully fertile. Dr. Cheyne was apparendy unaware of this 
poem of Gwion's, the substance of which can have come only from a 
Hebrew source uncontaminated by the Babylonian epic which the Jews 
picked up in their Captivity, and it is difficult to see from whom, other 
than the Essenes; especially as Gwion explains that the books from which 
he derives his wisdom were originally brought to Adam of Hebron by 
the angel Raphael. In Tobit and The Book of Enoch Raphael is described as 
the angel of healing and must therefore have been the chief patron of the 
therapeutic Essenes. 'Emmanuel' refers to Isaiah's prophecy of the birth 
of the Divine Child from a virgin: Jesus as Hercules. 
The story of Adam fasting in Jordan with water to his chin is found in 
the tenth-century Irish Saltair na Rann, and in the early mediaeval Life of 
Adam and Eve, on which the Saltair is based; when Adam fasted, accord-
ing to the Saltair, God rewarded him with pardon. But no source is 
known for the dispensation of wisdom to Moses by means of three 
Dominical rods (i.e. the rods of Sunday). It may be Essene tradition, for 
Sunday was the Essenes' great day, and recalls a reference to three rowan 
sods in one of the Iolo manuscripts. Sir John Rhys regards this manu-
script as genuine: 
Then Menw ap Teirgwaedd took the three rowan-rods growing out 
of the mouth of Einigan Gawr, and learned all the kinds of knowledge 
and science written on them, and taught them all, E X C E P T T H E N A M E O F 
GOD WHICH HAS ORIGINATED T H E BARDIC SECRET, and blessed is he who 
possesses it. 
The end of the poem, from stanza 27 onwards, is a separate piece, not 
Gwion's work, dating perhaps from the year 1 2 1 0 when, in the reign of 
King Llewelyn ap Iowerth, King John of England invaded North Wales 
and temporarily conquered it. 
Dr. Ifor Williams has expressed surprise that in the middle of Gwion's 
Cad Goddeu occurs the Triad: 
The three greatest tumults of the world— 
The Deluge, the Crucifixion, the Dayof Judgement. 
This seems to be a variant text of the lines I have printed from Nash's 
translation, and which occur twice in the poem: 
One of them relating 
The story of the Deluge 
And of the Cross of Christ 
And ofthe Day of Judgement near at hand. 
Dr. Williams's version makes perfect sense also in the Boibel-Loth story 
of Hercules riding on the flood in his golden cup—sacrificed on the moun-
tain—judging and establishing. The Aposdes' Creed, indeed, is the same 
old story—'conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary— 
suffered, was crucified—shall come to judge the quick and the dead.' 
156 
It is possible that the Apostles' Creed, the earliest Latin version of 
which is quoted by the second-century Tertullian, was originally 
composed by some Gnostic Christian in Egypt and syncretically modelled 
on the Hercules formula. For 'conceived by the Holy Ghost', when read 
in the Gnostic light, has a direct reference to the Flood. In Gnostic theory 
—the Gnostics first appear as a sect in the first century B.C.—Jesus was 
conceived in the mind of God's Holy Spirit, who was female in Hebrew 
and, according to Genesis I, 2, 'moved on the face of the waters'. The 
Virgin Mary was the physical vessel in which this concept was incarnate 
and 'Mary' to the Gnostics meant 'Of the Sea'. The male Holy Ghost is a 
product of Latin grammar—spiritus is masculine—and of early Christian 
mistrust of female deities or quasi-deities. Conception by a male principle 
is illogical and this is the only instance of its occurrence in all Latin 
literature. The masculinization of the Holy Spirit was assisted by a remark 
in the First Epistle of St. John, that Jesus would act as a paraclete or 
advocate for man with God the Father; in the Gospel of St. John the same 
figure is put in Jesus's own mouth in a promise that God will send them a 
paraclete (usually translated 'comforter') after he has gone; and this 
paraclete, a masculine noun, understood as a mystical emanation of Jesus, 
was wrongly identified with the archaic Spirit that moved on the face of 
the waters. The Gnostics, whose language was Greek, identified the Holy 
Spirit with Sophia, Wisdom; and Wisdom was female. In the early 
Christian Church the Creed was uttered only at baptism, which was a 
ceremony of initiation into the Christian mystery and at first reserved 
for adults; baptism was likewise a preliminary to participation in the 
Greek mysteries on which the Christian were modelled, as in the Druidic 
mysteries. 
The town of Eleusis, where the most famous mysteries of all took place, 
was said to be named after the Attic King Eleusis. Eleusis means 'Advent' 
and the word was adopted in the Christian mysteries to signify the arrival 
of the Divine Child; in English usage it comprises Christmas and the four 
preceding weeks. The mother of Eleusis was 'Daeira, daughter of 
Oceanus', 'the Wise One of the Sea', and was identified with Aphrodite, 
the Minoan Dove-goddess who rose from the sea at Paphos in Cyprus 
every year with her virginity renewed. King Eleusis was another name 
for the Corn-Dionysus, whose life-story was celebrated at the Great 
Mysteries, a Harvest Thanksgiving festival in late September; and his 
father was sometimes said to be Ogygus, or Ogyges, the Theban king in 
whose reign the great flood took place which engulfed the corn-lands of 
Boeotia. At an early stage of the yearly Eleusinian Mysteries the Divine 
Child, son of the Wise One who came from the Sea, was produced by 
mystagogues, dressed as shepherds, for the adoration of the celebrants. 
He was seated in a liknos, or osier harvest-basket. To judge from the 
I J 7 
corresponding myths of Moses, Taliesin, Llew Llaw, and Romulus, the 
mystagogues declared that diey found him on the river bank where he had 
landed after sailing over the flood in this same harvest-basket, caulked 
with sedge. It will shortly be mentioned that the liknos was used not 
only as harvest-basket, manger and cradle, but also as winnowing sieve; 
the method was to shovel up the corn and chaff together while the wind 
was blowing strong and sieve them through the osiers; the chaff was 
blown away and the corn fell in a heap. The Mysteries probably originated 
as a winnowing feast, for they took place some weeks after the wheat-
harvest, and at the time of the equinoctial winds. 
An interesting survival of these winnowing-feast mysteries is the 
Majorcan xiurell, or white clay whistle, decorated in red and green, and 
hand-made in the traditional shapes of mermaid, coiled serpent, bull-
headed man, full-skirted woman with a round hat rocking a baby in her 
arms, or with a flower instead of a baby, the same with a moon-disk sur-
mounted by cow's horns, man with a tall peaked hat and arms upraised in 
adoration, and litde man riding on a hornless, prick-eared, long-legged 
animal with a very short muzzle. It figures, with quince-boughs and boughs 
of the sorb-apple, in an ecclesiastical festival held at the village of Bona-
nova near Palma when the villagers perambulate a hill at night on the first 
Sunday after the 12th of September (the Feast of the Blessed Name of the 
Virgin Mary) which corresponds with the 23rd of September Old Style. 
The object of the whistle must originally have been to induce the North-
East winnowing winds which, according to the local almanack, begin to 
blow at this season and which at the end of the month summon rain 
clouds from the Atlantic Ocean to soak the winter wheat planted earlier 
in the month. But this is forgotten: winnowing in Majorca is now done 
at any time after the harvest and not celebrated with any festivities. The 
mermaid, locally called a 'siren', evidently represents Daeira (Aphrodite) 
the moon-mother of Eleusis (the Corn-Dionysus who is shown with her 
in the woman-and-baby xiurell); the bull-headed man is Dionysus himself 
grown to manhood; the man in the hat is a Tutor, or gran mascara; the 
little rider is likely to be Dionysus again but the species of his tall mount 
is indeterminate. The quince-boughs, sorb-boughs, and the white clay 
are also in honour of the Goddess—now invoked as the Virgin Mary. The 
Serpent is the wind itself. Since this is the only time of the year when wind 
is welcomed by the Majorcans who, being largely arboricultural, fear the 
sirocco as they fear the Devil—the farmer's purse, as they say, hangs on 
the bough of a tree—the sound of whisding is not heard in the island 
except in the xiurell season. The ploughman sings as he drives his mule 
and the schoolboy as he runs home from school; for the rest furbis,flabis, 
flebis—'whistle shrill, weep long'. More about the White Goddess and 
whisding for wind will be found in Chapter Twenty-Four. 
158 
'King Ogygus' is a name invented to explain why Eleusis was called 
'Ogygiades'. There was really no such king as Eleusis: Eleusis signified 
the Advent of the Divine Child. And the Child was not really a son of 
Ogygus: he was the son of the Queen of the Island of Ogygia, namely 
Calypso. And Calypso was Daeira, or Aphrodite, again—the Wise One 
of the Sea, the spirit who moved upon the face of the waters. The fact was 
that, like Taliesin and Merlin and Llew Llaw and probably in the original 
version Moses1 too, Eleusis had no father, only a virgin mother; he origi-
nated before the institution of fatherhood. To the patriarchal Greeks this 
seemed shameful and they therefore fathered him on either 'Ogygus' or 
Hermes—but more generally on Hermes because of the sacred phalluses 
displayed at the festival, heaped in the same useful liknos. The Vine-
Dionysus once had no father, either. His nativity appears to have been 
that of an earlier Dionysus, the Toadstool-god; for the Greeks believed 
that mushrooms and toadstools were engendered by lightning—not 
sprung from seed like all other plants. When the tyrants of Athens, 
Corinth and Sicyon legalizedDionysus-worship in their cities, they 
limited the orgies, it seems, by substituting wine for toadstools; thus the 
myth of the Toadstool-Dionysus became attached to the Vine-Dionysus, 
who now figured as a son of Semele the Theban and Zeus, Lord of 
Lightning. Yet Semele was sister of Agave, who tore off her son Pen-
theus's head in a Dionysiac frenzy. To the learned Gwion the Vine-
Dionysus and the Corn-Dionysus were both recognizably Christ, Son 
of Alpha—that is, son of the letter A: 
The wheat rich in grain, 
And red flowing wine 
Christ's pure body make, 
Son of Alpha. 
According to the Talmudic Targum Yerushalmi on Genesis II, y, 
Jehovah took dust from the centre of the earth and from all quarters of the 
earth and mingled it with waters of all the seas to create Adam. The angel 
Michael collected the dust. Since the Jewish rabbis preferred to alter 
rather than destroy ancient traditions which seemed damaging to their 
new cult of transcendent Jehovah, an original story may be postulated in 
which Michal (not Michael) of Hebron, the goddess from whom David 
derived his tide of King by marriage with her priestess, was Adam's 
creatrix. David married Michal at Hebron, and Hebron may be called the 
centre of the earth, from its position near the junction of two seas and the 
three ancient continents. This identification of Michal with Michael would 
seem forced, were it not that the name Michael occurs only in post-exilic 
1 Sir Flinders Petrie holds that Moses is an Egyptian word meaning 'unfathered son of a 
princess'. 
159 
writings, and is not therefore a part of ancient Jewish tradition, and that 
in A Discourse on Mary by Cyril of Jerusalem, printed by Budge in his 
Miscellaneous Coptic Texts, this passage occurs: 
It is written in the Gospel to the Hebrews [a lost gospel of the Ebion-
ites, supposedly the original of St. Matthew] that when Christ wished 
to come upon earth to men, the Good Father called a mighty power in 
the Heavens which was called Michael and committed Christ to its care 
And the power descended on earth and was called Mary, and Christ 
was in her womb seven months, after which she gave birth to h i m . . . . 
The mystical Essene Ebionites of the first century A . D . believed in a 
female Holy Spirit; and those members of the sect who embraced 
Christianity and developed into the second-century Clementine Gnostics 
made the Virgin Mary the vessel of this Holy Spirit—whom they named 
Michael ('Who is like God?'). According to the Clementines, whose 
religious theory is popularized in a novel called The Recognitions,1 the 
identity of true religion in all ages depends on a series of incarnations of 
the Wisdom of God, of which Adam was the first and Jesus the last. In 
this poem pf Gwion's, Adam has no soul after his creation until Eve 
animates him. 
But Caleb, according to the Hanes Taliesin riddle, conveyed the Holy 
Spirit to Hebron when, in the time of Joshua, he ousted the Anakim from 
the shrine of Machpelah. Machpelah, an oracular cave cut from the rock, 
was the sepulchre of Abraham, and Caleb went there to consult his shade. 
The priestly editor of Genesis describes it as the sepulchre also of Sarah 
and Jacob (Genesis XXIII, 19; XXV, 9; L, z j ) and in XXXV, 29 
implies that Isaac was buried there too. The statement about Jacob is 
contradicted in Genesis L, 11, where it is said that he was buried in Abel-
Mizraim. Moreover, Isaac originally lived at Beer-Lahai-Roi (Genesis 
XXIV, 62; XXV, 11) where he probably had an oracular shrine at one 
time, for Beer-Lahai-Roi means 'the Well of the Antelope's Jawbone' and 
if Isaac was a Boibalos, or Antelope-king, his prophetic jawbone—jaw-
bones were the rule in oracular shrines, usually stored there, it seems, with 
the hero's navel-string—would naturally give its name to the well; there 
was a sacred cave near by, which eventually became a Christian chapel. 
Thus it is likely that neither Isaac nor Jacob nor their 'wives' were at first 
associated with the cave. The story of its purchase from Ephron (a 
'Power', as I suggest, of the Boibel-Loth) and the Children of Heth, 
usually regarded as Hittites, is told in Genesis XXIII. Though late and 
much edited, this chapter seems to record a friendly arrangement between 
1 Voltaire modelled his Candide on it; and it has the distinction of appearing in the select 
list of books in Milton's Areopagitiea, along with John Skelton's Poems, as deserving of 
permanent suppression. 
160 
the devotees of the Goddess Sarah, the Goddess of the tribe of Isaac, and 
their allies the devotees of the Goddess Heth (Hathor? Tethys?) who 
owned the shrine: Sarah was forced out of Beer-Lahai-Roi by another 
tribe and came to seek an asylum at near-by Hebron. Since Sarah was a 
Laughing Goddess and her progeny was destined to be 'like the sand of 
the sea shore' she was evidently a Sea-goddess of the Aphrodite type. 
All that is needed to clinch this argument in poetic logic is for Caleb in 
Jewish tradition to have married someone called Michal who was a 
representative of the local Sea-goddess. He did even better: he married 
Miriam.1 (The Talmudic tradition is that 'she was neither beautiful nor in 
good health'). The equation that follows is: Miriam I = Holy Spirit = 
Michal = Michael == Miriam II. Michael, then, was regarded as the instru-
ment chosen for the creation of the First Adam, and used Hebron dust 
and sea water; and Jesus was the Second Adam; and Michael, or Miriam 
('Sea-brine') the Virgin Mary, was similarly the instrument of his creation. 
Jesus was also held to have fulfilled the prophecy in the i ioth Psalm: 
Jehovah has sworn and will not repent: thou art a priest forever 
after the order of Melchizedek. 
This is enlarged upon in St. Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews. Melchizedek 
(Genesis XIV, 18-20) the Sacred King of Salem who welcomed 'Abra-
ham' to Canaan ('Abraham' being in this sense the far-travelled tribe that 
came down into Palestine from Armenia at the close of the third millen-
nium B.C.) 'had neither father nor mother'. 'Salem' is generally taken to 
mean Jerusalem and it is probable that Salem occurs in the Boibel-Loth 
as a compliment to Melchizedek, who was priest to the Supreme God. 
But J. N. Schofield in his Historical Background to the Bible notes that to 
this day the people of Hebron have not forgiven David for moving his 
capital to Jerusalem ('Holy Salem') which they refer to as 'The New 
Jerusalem' as though Hebron were the authentic one. There is a record 
in the Talmud of a heretical sect of Jews, called Melchizedekians, who 
frequented Hebron to worship the body (consult the spirit?) of Adam 
which was buried in the cave of Machpelah. If these Melchizedekians wor-
shipped Adam, the only other character in the Bible who had neither 
1A similar marriage was that of Joshua to Rahab the Sea-goddess, who appears in the 
Bible as Rahab the Harlot. By this union, according to Sifre, the oldest Midrash, they had 
daughters only, from whom descended many prophets including Jeremiah; and Hannah, 
Samuel's mother, was Rahab's incarnation. The story of Samuel's birth suggests that these 
'daughters of Rahab' were a matrilinear college of prophetic priestesses by ritual marriage 
with whom Joshua secured his title to the Jericho valley. Since Rahab is also said to have 
married Salmon (and so to have become an ancestress of David and Jesus) it may well be that 
Salmon was the title that Joshua assumed at his marriage; for a royal marriage involved a 
ritual death and rebirth with a change of name, as when Jacob married Rachel the Dove-
priestess and became Ish-Rachel or Israel—'Rachel's man*. 
1 6 1 
father nor mother, they were doubtless identifying Melchizedek's king-
ship with the autochthonous Adam's. For Adam, 'the red man', seems to 
have been the original oracular hero of Machpelah; it is likely that Caleb 
consulted his shadenot Abraham's, unless Adam and Abraham are tides 
of the same hero. Elias Levita, the fifteenth-century Hebrew commentator, 
records the tradition that the teraphim which Rachel stole from her father 
Laban were mummified oracular heads and that the head of Adam was 
among them. If he was right, the Genesis narrative refers to a seizure of the 
oracular shrine of Hebron by Saul's Benjamites from the Calebites. 
Caleb was an Edomite clan; which suggests the identification of Edom 
with Adam: they are the same word, meaning 'red'. But if Adam was really 
Edom, one would expect to find a tradition that the head of Esau, the 
ancestor of the Edomites, was also buried at Hebron; and this is, in fact, 
supplied by the Talmud. The artificial explanation given there is that Esau 
and his sons opposed the burial of Jacob in the Cave of Machpelah on the 
ground that it was an Edomite possession; that Joseph, declaring that it 
had ceased to be Edomite when Jacob sold his birthright to Esau, sent to 
Egypt for the relevant documents; that a fight ensued in which the sons of 
Jacob were .victorious and Esau was beheaded at one stroke by a dumb 
Danite; that Esau's body was carried off for burial on Mount Seir by his 
sons; and that his head was buried at Hebron by Joseph. 
Melchizedek's lack of a father is intelligible, but why should he have no 
mother? Perhaps the stories of Moses, Llew Llaw, Romulus and Cretan 
Zeus explain this. In every case the boy is removed from his mother as 
soon as born. Thus, in effect, he has no mother; usually a goat, a wolf or a 
pig suckles him and he passes under the care of tutors. It is the transitional 
stage from matriarchy to patriarchy. In the Eleusinian Mysteries the Divine 
Child was carried in by shepherds, not by his mother or by a nurse. 
The seventh and eighth stanzas of Yr Awdil Vraith are the strangest of 
all: 
Twice five, ten and eight, 
She was self-bearing, 
The mixed burden 
Ofman-woman. 
And once, not hidden, 
She brought forth Abel, 
And Cain the solitary 
Homicide. 
This means, I suppose, that Eve bore twenty-eight children, acting as her 
own midwife, then Cain and Abel and then . . . A stanza has been sup-
pressed: a stanza evidently containing the Sethian heresy, a well-known 
development of the Clementine syncretic theory, in which Seth was 
162 
viewed as an earlier incarnation of Jesus. 1 It will be recalled that Rhea 
figures in the Hanes Taliesin riddle—Rhea as the mother both of Cretan 
Zeus and Romulus. The legend was that she bore a number of children, 
all of whom Saturn her lover ate, until finally she bore Zeus who escaped 
and eventually avenged his brothers on Saturn by castrating him. Gwion 
is hinting that Eve, whom he identifies with Rhea, brought forth thirty 
children in all—and then the Divine Child Seth. Thirty doubdess because 
the 'reign of Saturn' lasted thirty days and culminated with the mid-
winter feast which afterwards became Yule, or Christmas. The letter R 
(Riuben or Rhea or Reu in the Boibel-Loth, and Ruis in the Beth-Luis-
Nion) is allotted to the last month of the year. The reign of Saturn there-
fore corresponds with the Christian period of Advent, preliminary to the 
Day of the birth of the Divine Child. Sir James Frazer givec details of this 
thirty-day period in the Golden Bough, in his account of the fourth-
century martyr St. Dasius. The Clementines rejected the orthodox story 
of the Fall as derogatory to the dignity of Adam and Eve, and Gwion in 
his version similarly puts the blame for their expulsion wholly on Satan. 
The 'twelve young men, four of them angels' (i.e. evangels), are 
evidently the twelve tribes of Israel, four of whom—Joseph, Simeon 
(Simon), Judah (Jude) and Levi (Matthew)—gave their names to books 
in the early canon of the New Testament; and they perhaps represent the 
twelve signs of the Zodiac in Clementine syncretism. 
The stanza: 
Solomon obtained, 
In Babel's tower, 
All the sciences 
OfAsia's 'ana. 
needs careful examination. 'The confusion of languages after the fall of 
Babel' was taken by Babylonian Jews to refer to the fall of the famous 
nggorath, 'the hanging gardens', of Babylon. But the nggorath, unlike 
the Tower of Babel, was completed. It is much more likely that the myth 
1 In the Ethiopian Legends of Our Lady Mary, translated by Bridge, the Gnostic theory is 
clearly given. Hannah the 'twenty-pillared tabernacle of Testimony' who was the Virgin 
Mary's mother, was one of a triad of sisters—of which the other two were another Mary and 
Sophia. 'The Virgin first came down into the body of Seth, shining like a white pearl.' Then 
successively entered Enos, Ca inan . . . Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lantech, N o a h . . . Abraham, 
Isaac, Jacob. . . David, Solomon. . . and Joachim. 'And Joachim said to his wife Hannah: 
"I saw Heaven open and a white bird came therefrom and hovered over my head." N o w , this 
bird had its being in the days of old. . . It was the Spirit ot Life in the form of a white bird 
and . . . became incarnate in Hannah's womb when the pearl went forth from Joachim's loins 
a n d . . . Hannah received it, namely the body of our Lady Mary. The white pearl is mentioned 
for its purity, and the white bird because Mary's soul existed aforetime with the Ancient of 
Days. . . Thus bird and pearl are alike and equal.' From the Body of Mary, the pearl, the 
white bird of the spirit then entered into Jesus at the Baptism. 
I 6 3 
originates in the linguistic confusion caused by the Indo-Germanic con-
quest of Byblos, the Egyptianized metropolis of the People of the Sea, at 
the beginning of the second millennium B.C. Doubtless there was a 
'babble of tongues' in Babylon, but it was not caused by any sudden 
catastrophe, and the babblers could at least communicate with one another 
in the official Assyrian language. Whether or not the Byblians had begun 
work on a gigantic Egyptian temple at the time that the city was stormed 
and were unable to complete it, I do not know; but if they had done so 
their misfortune would naturally have been ascribed to divine jealousy at 
the innovation. 
Moreover, 'Asia' was the name of the mother by Iapetus, who appears 
in Genesis as Japhet, Noah's son, of the 'Pelasgians' Atlas and Prome-
theus; thus the 'Land of Asia' in stanzas 6 and 24 is a synonym for 
the Eastern Mediterranean, though more properly it meant Southern 
Asia Minor. King Solomon who reigned about a thousand years after the 
original fall of Byblos—it had fallen and risen several times meanwhile— 
may well have learned his religious secrets from Byblos, which the Jews 
knew as Gebal, for the Byblians helped him to build his Temple. This is 
mentioned in 1 Kings, V, 18, though in the Authorised Version 'the men 
of Gebal' is mistranslated 'stone-squarers'. 
And Solomon's builders and Hiram's builders did hew the stones, 
and the men of Gebal; so they prepared timber and stones to build the 
house. 
'Gebal' means 'mountain-height'. The deep wisdom of Byblos—from 
which the Greek word for 'book' (and the English word Bible) derives— 
is compared by Ezekiel, the prophet to whom the Essenes seem to have 
owed most, to that of Hiram's Tyre (E{ekiel, XXVII, 8-9); Tyre was an 
early Cretan trading centre. Solomon certainly built his temple in Aegean 
style, closely resembling that of the Great Goddess at Hierapolis described 
by Lucian in his De Dea Syria. There was a Danaan colony close to 
Byblos, dating from the fourteenth century B.C. 
It is possible that though the Calebites interpreted 'Adam' as the 
Semitic word Edom ('red') the original hero at Hebron was the Danaan 
Adamos or Adamas or Adamastos, 'the Unconquerable', or 'the Inexor-
able', a Homeric epithet of Hades, borrowed from the Death Goddess 
his mother. 
164 
Chapter Ten 
THE TREE ALPHABET ( i ) 
1first found the Beth-Luis-Nion tree-alphabet in Roderick O'Flaherty's Ogygia;he presents it, with the Boibel-Loth, as a genuine relic of Druidism orally transmitted down the centuries. It is said to have been 
latterly used for divination only and consists of five vowels and thirteen 
consonants. Each letter is named after the tree or shrub of which it is the 
initial: 
Beth B Birch 
Luis L Rowan 
Nion N Ash 
Fearn F Alder 
Saille S Willow 
Uath H Hawthorn 
Duir D Oak 
Tinne T Holly 
Coll C Hazel 
Muin M Vine 
Gort G Ivy 
Pethboc P Dwarf Elder 
Ruis R Elder 
Ailm A Silver Fir 
Onn O Furze 
Ur u Heather 
Eadha E White Poplar 
Idho I Y e w 
The names of the letters in the modern Irish alphabet are also those of 
trees, and most of them correspond with O'Flaherty's list, though T has 
become gorse; O, broom; and A, elm. 
I noticed almost at once that the consonants of this alphabet form a 
calendar of seasonal tree-magic, and that all the trees figure prominently 
in European folklore. 
B F O R B E T H 
The first tree of the series is the self-propagating birch. Birch twigs are 
used throughout Europe in the bearing of bounds and the flogging of 
delinquents—and formerly lunatics—with the object of expelling evil 
spirits. When Gwion writes in the Cad Goddeu that the birch 'armed him-
self but late' he means that birch twigs do not toughen until late in the 
year. (He makes the same remark about the willow and the rowan whose 
twigs were similarly put to ceremonial use.) Birch rods are also used in 
rustic ritual for driving out the spirit of the old year. The Roman lictors 
carried birch rods during the installation of the Consuls at this very same 
season; each Consul had twelve lictors, making a company of thirteen. 
The birch is the tree of inception. It is indeed the earliest forest tree, with 
the exception of the mysterious elder, to put out new leaves (April ist in 
England, the beginning of the financial year), and in Scandinavia its leafing 
marks the beginning of the agricultural year, because farmers use it as a 
directory for sowing their Spring wheat. The first month begins 
immediately after the winter solstice, when the days after shortening to 
the extreme limit begin to lengthen again. 
Since there are thirteen consonants in the alphabet, it is reasonable to 
regard the tree month as the British common-law 'lunar' month of twenty-
eight days defined by Blackstone. As has already been pointed out, there 
are thirteen such months in a solar year, with one day left over. Caesar 
and Pliny both record that the Druidic year was reckoned by lunar months, 
but neither defines a lunar month, and there is nothing to prove that it 
was a 'lunation' of roughly twenty-nine and a half days—of which there 
are twelve in a year with ten and three-quarter days left over. For the 
first-century B.C. 'Coligny Calendar', which is one of lunations, is no 
longer regarded as Druidic; it is engraved in Roman letters on a brass 
tablet and is now thought to be part of the Romanizing of native religion 
attempted under the early Empire. Moreover, twenty-eight is a true lunar 
month not only in the astronomical sense of the moon's revolutions in 
relation to the sun, but in the mystic sense that the Moon, being a woman, 
has a woman's normal menstrual period ('menstruation' is connected with 
the word 'moon')1 of twenty-eight days. 8 The Coligny system was prob-
1 T h e magical connection of the Moon with menstruation is strong and widespread. The 
baleful moon-dew used by the witches of Thessaly was apparendy a girl's first menstrual 
blood, taken during an eclipse of the Moon. Pliny devotes a whole chapter of his Natural 
History to the subject and gives a long list of the powers for good and bad that a menstruating 
woman possesses. Her touch can blast vines, ivy and rue, fade purple cloth, blacken linen in 
the wash-tub, tarnish copper, make bees desert their hives, and cause abortions in mares; but 
she can also rid a field of pests by walking around it naked before sunrise, calm a storm at sea 
by exposing her genitals, and cure boils, erysipelas, hydrophobia and barrenness. In the 
Talmud it is said that if a menstruating woman passes between two men, one of them will die. 
* Even in healthy women there is greater variation in the length of time elapsing between 
periods than is generally supposed: it may be anything from twenty-one to thirty-five days. 
166 
ably brought into Britain by the Romans of the Claudian conquest and 
memories of its intercalated days are said by Professor T. Glynn Jones to 
survive in Welsh folklore. But that in both Irish and Welsh myths of the 
highest antiquity 'a year and a day' is a term constantly used suggests that 
the Beth-Luis-Nion Calendar is one of 364 days plus one. We can there-
fore regard the Birch month as extending from December 24th to January 
20th. 
L F O R L u i s 
The second tree is the quickbeam ('tree of life'), otherwise known as 
the quicken, rowan or mountain ash. Its round wattles, spread with 
newly-flayed bull's hides, were used by the Druids as a last extremity for 
compelling demons to answer difficult questions—hence the Irish 
proverbial expression 'to go on the wattles of knowledge', meaning to do 
one's utmost to get information. The quickbeam is also the tree most 
widely used in the British Isles as a prophylactic against lightning and 
witches' charms of all sorts: for example, bewitched horses can be con-
trolled only with a rowan whip. In ancient Ireland, fires of rowan were 
kindled by the Druids of opposing armies and incantations spoken over 
them, summoning spirits to take part in the fight. The berries of the 
magical rowan in the Irish romance of Fraoth, guarded by a dragon, had 
the sustaining virtue of nine meals; they also healed the wounded and 
added a year to a man's life. In the romance of Diarmuid and Grainne, the 
rowan berry, with the apple and the red nut, is described as the food of 
the gods. 'Food of the gods' suggests that the taboo on eating anything 
red was an extension of the commoners' taboo on eating scarlet toadstools 
—for toadstools, according to a Greek proverb which Nero quoted, were 
'the food of the gods'. In ancient Greece all red foods such as lobster, 
bacon, red mullet, crayfish and scarlet berries and fruit were tabooed 
except at feasts in honour of the dead. (Red was the colour of death in 
Greece and Britain during the Bronze Age—red ochre has been found in 
megalithic burials both in the Prescelly Mountains and on Salisbury 
Plain.) The quickbeam is the tree of quickening. Its botanical name 
Fraxinus, or Pyrus, Aucuparia, conveys its divinatory uses. Another of its 
names is 'the witch'; and the witch-wand, formerly used for metal divin-
ing, was made of rowan. Since it was the tree of quickening it could also 
be used in a contrary sense. In Danaan Ireland a rowan-stake hammered 
through a corpse immobilized its ghost; and in the Cuchulain saga three 
hags spitted a dog, Cuchulain's sacred animal, on rowan twigs to procure 
his death. 
The oracular use of the rowan explains the unexpected presence of 
great rowan thickets in Riigen and the other Baltic amber-islands, for-
merly used as oracular places, and the frequent occurrence of rowan, 
167 
noted by John Lightfoot in his Flora Scotica, 1777, in the neighbourhood 
of ancient stone circles. The second month extends from January 21st to 
February 17th. The important Celtic feast of Candlemas fell in the middle 
of it (February 2nd). It was held to mark the quickening of the year, and 
was the first of the four 'cross-quarter days' on which British witches 
celebrated their Sabbaths, the others being May Eve, Lammas (August 
2nd) and All Hallow E'en, when the year died. These days correspond 
with the four great Irish fire-feasts mentioned by Cormac the tenth-
century Archbishop of Cashel. In Ireland and the Highlands February 2nd 
is, very properly, the day of St. Brigit, formerly the White Goddess, the